


Lost to the Void

by RolloDex



Category: Elite Dangerous, VEGA Conflict, Warframe
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-03
Updated: 2019-11-19
Packaged: 2020-02-16 16:04:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 29,682
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18694786
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RolloDex/pseuds/RolloDex
Summary: Living life is rarely an exact science, but even so, it's not often that people end up completely out of their depth. Ironically, it's during those trying times that their true nature is revealed, their character pushed to the limit and beyond. A story of pushing boundaries, breaking borders, and shooting space bugs. Lots and lots of space bugs.





	1. Murphy's Law

**A project whose genesis lies in a high-school english project with a few hundred words that eventually burgeoned into the work you see here. Progress was never uniform, being made in fits and starts, and as a result, there are parts that are written in a distinctly different voice than others. Eventually, I do intend to go back through and try to normalize everything, in addition to  addressing the multitude of grammatical errors that Grammarly is flagging. I'm uploaded so that all three of my readers (wishful thinking, maybe) don't go wanting through finals week. Something to keep in mind about the story itself is that yes, in essence, I'm simply stealing aspects of games that I like and building a universe out of those cannibalized parts. Am I aware that it's a rather lazy way to go about writing? Yes. Do I particularly care? No, not really. I do try to add my own flair to things, though, so if you decide to give this a go, I'll do my best to keep you engaged. The games I chose all have very little or rather lackluster story aspects, leaving me a _lot_ of room for creative license. Because of this, most of the content in this story is stuff I came up with, filling in the basic framework offered by the games. So, without further ado, I present _Lost to the Void_. I hope you enjoy.**

* * *

 

That was it.

He was done with this damn sector.

Nothing but aggressive alliances, overactive V-Sec and Demon Corps forces, and aliens popping up where they were least expected and even less welcome.

But finally, the jump core was done cooling down, and he was finally able to leave this hellhole behind, and not a moment too soon. The hostile sector had taken its toll on his fleets, and currently he only had two operational.

Glancing over at the fleet diagnostic display, he confirmed that all the operational fleets were pulled in. What a sorry fate that was, getting left behind to fend for yourself when a forgetful or vindictive commander failed to send out a recall order before jumping away. Some of the luckier ships managed to find another base to call home, and were often welcomed with open arms. Their arrival signified free ships, and free ships were never turned down. His hospitality was notorious, and so his base had obtained several fleets worth of ships this way. He never had any reason to regret his decision to take the rogue fleets in.

Others attempted to establish a new base of their own, and some succeeded, though more tended to be mercilessly destroyed by an aggressive VEGA, V-Sec, or Rebel fleet—the debris then joining the untold millions of other scraps floating through the void. Others looked to planet life; this was what most of the abandoned fleets gravitated towards, done with spacefaring. The ships, once landed, could be used as an effective shelter for the crew— they had been built to withstand the vacuum of space, after all—and the crew could then establish a planetary colony. These colonies were everywhere, and they were mostly overlooked by Vega as they weren’t producing much that could be exploited. They were often allied with some of the orbiting mining stations, exchanging food and other services for protection and resources only found in the orbital belts. While the ships they called home were armed, they were immobile, and therefore vulnerable.

A light began to flash on the console to his left, catching his attention. Turning his head to regard the screen next to the blinking diode, he saw a large Demon Corp fleet making its way toward the planet, and judging from the trajectory, they were headed straight for the station.

“Sybil.”

The single word cut through the silence, echoing in the enclosed space looking out over the bridge.

A hologram flickered to life behind him, resolving itself into a fiery-haired woman that acted as the avatar for the station’s central AI.

“Yes, Commander Vesper?”

“Begin the pre-jump diagnostic checks, and make it quick, I want to be gone before that fleet shows up, if at all possible.”

He paused.

“On second thought, Sybil, have Alpha intercept them, I don’t want to risk damaging the jump core and get stuck here for any longer than I have to. I’m going down to Central Command to coordinate the attack.”

“Yes, sir. Shall I have Delta accompany them?”

Vesper thought for a moment. It was a risky move, to be sure, as the rest of his fleets were down for repairs. There was also the chance that Alpha would get spotted and intercepted by one of the more aggressive rebel commanders who happened to be bored and looking for a fight. That would leave his base open to attack, as he knew that Delta was not comprised of the proper ships to successfully defend against the incoming Demon Corp fleet. An escorting fleet tended to discourage other rebel commanders from getting any ideas, but it would also mean that his base really would be defenseless.

Weighing the options, he came to the conclusion that the likelihood of Alpha getting jumped was too high for his liking. His base had already weathered several brutal attacks, so the word that it was a tough nut to crack had likely spread.

“Yes, that seems like a good idea, see to it.”

Sybil nodded, then flickered and disappeared as he headed for the lift that would take him down to the main bridge.

“Captain on deck!”

The proclamation rang out almost as soon as he stepped onto the bridge, and there was a collective shuffling as the bridge crew rose to salute him.

“At ease.” Clearly the crew had been monitoring the progress of the Demon Corp fleet as well and had come to the same conclusion he had and had been expecting him to come down to command the attack. He also noted that the bridge had been prepped for an attack. Even though he hoped to avoid a base assault, it was comforting to see fire extinguishers at the ready and the blast shields lowered halfway.

Vesper approached his second in command, a powerfully built man by the name of Sargon Estrada. As Sybil reappeared next to Sargon, she bent to peer over his shoulder at his readouts, poking a few to displays to scroll through their readouts. Vesper knew she didn’t really need to do that—she was the base’s AI, after all—but he knew that she liked to act human sometimes.

Sargon was at his customary station, overseeing the operation of the bridge and, by extension, the base as a whole. Sargon was one of Vesper’s most invaluable assets, as he knew the highs and lows of the station and its operation like no one else, more so than even Sybil, and Vesper relied on him more than he cared to admit.

“Morning, Sargon. We on to give our guests a proper welcome?”

“Yes sir, the combat modules are charged, the targeting systems are calibrated, and the munition stores have been replenished. Delta has been on guard duty, so they’re just awaiting the launch of Alpha and then they’ll get going.” Sargon rattled off the readiness of the entire operation without pause, a feat that had surprised Vesper when he had first met the big man, but had now come to accept as normal.

“Excellent, I don’t want them getting near that jump core, we’ve been here long enough as it is.” Vesper turned his attention to the readout of the fleet bay. “So what is Alpha waiting on?”

“A few last minute checks, clearance to take off, and of course,” here Sargon snorted in amusement, “the Captain.”

Vesper sighed and rubbed his temple, more out of habit than because of an actual headache, hearing several snickers from the surrounding bridge crew. “I swear, we could be actively under attack from every hostile force in this sector, and it still wouldn’t be enough to get that pile of bricks up in a timely fashion.”

The snickers spread, as no one was deluded as to whom he was referring. Vesper moved to the raised platform just behind Sargon’s station and seated himself in the command chair there. It afforded him an unrestricted view of the entire bridge and through the enormous wrap-around window that opened out onto the entire operation. As he sat down he mused on how he was sure that one of these days, that girl was gonna be the death of him…

Thankfully, he was saved from further humiliation at the hands of his best captain as the com crackled to life and the voice of the source of the biggest pain in the ass on the station echoed from the speaker. A hologram of the person in question flickered into view, and Vesper scowled at it.

“I swear, one of these days the universe _isn’t_ going to wait on your sleep schedule, and where will that leave us?”

The person in the hologram smirked, cocking her head at him in an infuriatingly self-assured manner. “Oh please, the universe knows better than to try that. But in the purely theoretical scenario in which that happens, I’d say that you’d be pretty lost without me.”

“Is that so? You know, Maeve, we’re not exactly defenseless here either. In fact, I do believe our guns are much bigger than yours are.” Vesper retorted, a small smile tugging at the corner of his lips despite his best efforts to quell it.

Maeve’s smile widened, “Oh, I wasn’t referring to physical attack, dear brother,” Vesper rolled his eyes at this, “I think we both know it’s been proven that it takes a higher intellect to command a fleet over a base. I’m not being mean; it’s just proven scientific fact.”

“If that’s the case, you should get your butt out of that fleet bay and go and show those Demon Corp just how massive your intellect is.” Vesper fired back, glancing at the readout of the incoming fleet again. If Alpha launched soon, they should be able to hit it far enough away from the base to minimize the risk of collateral damage.

“Just waiting on the docking clamps to be released and the umbilicals to be retracted, then all we need is permission to launch and we’ll be out of your hair.” Maeve replied, smile fading a little as she looked at her own readout. Clearly she was on the same track he was. “Permission to launch, Commander?”

“Permission granted, Captain. Please proceed to the rendezvous with Delta, then continue to the interception point. Keep them away from that jump core at all costs, we’re going to pre-charge the capacitors and begin circulating the dark matter through the rotaries so that we can be away before anything else shows up. Risky, I know,” he admitted at Maeve’s surprised glance, “But chances are that the Demon Corp fleet has already called for reinforcements. We know that our reputation has spread, and so they’re probably expecting something like this. Depending on how powerful the fleet is, I may order Delta to engage as well, just to wrap this whole thing up quicker.” He turned to Sargon for a moment. “Configure our scanners for longest range possible, I want to know if they called for friends.”

Sargon raised an eyebrow. “That’ll leave us with blind spots near the base, though.”

Vesper nodded. “Yeah, it will, but we’ve swept the asteroid field, and that’s really the only place where anyone would be able to hide. It’s a risk I’m willing to take, especially considering that alien activity is low right now, and they’re the only ones who would be able to get past the scanner ring.”

Sargon nodded and turned back to his console, attempting to swat Sybil’s hand away as she tried to point him to the proper console. His hand ended up passing straight through the hologram, but Sybil got the message and left Sargon alone. Vesper turned his attention back to Maeve’s hologram, raising an eyebrow. “Well? What’re you waiting for? Get on out of here and go give them hell.”

Maeve’s smile widened again, taking on a predatory nature as she saluted. “With pleasure.”

“Good luck, Captain.” Vesper replied as he returned the salute.

She snorted, saying, “Luck? Pfft, I don’t need luck,” just before she vanished.

Vesper rolled his eyes again, turning to face the fleet bay as the main bay doors began to open. As they groaned to a stop a moment passed, and then an enormous ship came roaring out of the depths of the gargantuan module.

A Mark V Hellfire Battleship. Sleek, beautiful, and deadly. Capable of carrying an arsenal exceeding that of a large space station, it was one of five such ships in Vesper’s navy. Currently armed with the staple of most battleship fleets, Vector Torpedoes and a single NET Torpedo, it and its brethren formed the backbone of Vesper’s navy.

The figurehead for it, though…

With a guttural rumble that was felt more than heard, a Dominion Carrier, pride of Vesper’s navy and Maeve’s personal flagship and command vessel, clawed its way out of fleet bay. The monstrous ship, christened the _Gilded Guardian,_ was at least three times the size of each of the Hellfires, and served as the centerpiece of the fleet. Instead of the conventional weapons utilized by other ships, it was outfitted solely with fighter bays capable of producing and launching swarms of deadly drones at distances unmatched by any conventional weapon. It was also one of the few ships large enough to sustain a support field, allowing it to enhance friendly ships flying within the area of effect. At the moment it was outfitted with an agility field, allowing the Dominion to siphon some of its reactor’s power and use it to increase the engine performance of ships in range, bolstering their speed and turning rates. Mighty as it was, it suffered from one flaw, being that it was an incredibly slow and lumbering target, and although it was outfitted with powerful shields and strong armor, it was still relatively easy pickings for anything that got through its screen of fighters and escorts.

Vesper felt a childlike thrill as he watched the massive ship slowly pass by the viewport, one that never seemed to fade no matter how many times he saw a ship’s launch.

As the ships grouped up outside the viewport, another fleet of ships, this one comprised of smaller ships with disproportionately large engines, roared over the bridge, rattling anything not secured to the deck. These were Vesper’s Python and Basilisk Cutters, and they formed his primary rushing fleet. However, they also often served as his base’s first line of defense, as they excelled at interception. Faster than anything else around, these ships traded overwhelming firepower for lightning fast forward speed and very heavy forward-facing armor. When Vesper wanted something dead fast, he called on his cutters.

The two fleets met, the cutter’s bright engine flares dying as they matched speeds with their slower comrades. The conjoined fleet moved towards the outer rim of the base, and once beyond the mass-shadow of the collection of buildings, they flickered, blurred, then vanished in a flash of light as they engaged their hyperdrives, heading out into the sector to intercept their unwelcome guests.

“C&C Relay, launching,” said Sargon as soon as the ships had blinked out of existence. Unseen from the bridge, a small port opened in a bank of various rocket and missile launchers. Shortly afterward a small rocket lanced out towards the blackness where the two fleets had been moments before. The small rocket carried one of the most vital elements of any operation carried out away from the base, and was basically a camera, a powerful sensor/communication package, transponder, and RFID beacon all strapped to an engine and sent in after a fleet to allow those on the bridge to monitor the progress of whatever endeavor the fleet was engaged in. Normally, the Relay was launched amongst the fleet, but several years before Vesper figured out that launching it just behind the fleet oftentimes left would-be interceptors homing in and attempting to interdict the Relay instead. Instead of launching it within the fleet, it was sent out shortly after the fleet jumped, its beacon pinging the fleet’s RFID while the fleet itself masked its own. The relay was too small to be pulled from lightspeed by conventional means, and by the time the aggressors realized their mistake the fleet was long gone.

Turning again to his readouts, Vesper brought up the sector view, a large donut-shaped ring of visibility thanks to the long-range scanner configuration. As he watched, the two fleets appeared on the inner edge; displayed as two large, elaborate blue arrows moving towards the foreboding black and red arrow representing the approaching Demon Corp fleet. Sweeping his view around the edges of the displayed area, Vesper was surprised that he didn’t see any other large fleets headed in his direction.

“What are they playing at?” he muttered to himself, trying to figure out what good a single Demon Corp fleet would do to his heavily fortified base and highly advanced fleets. A feeling of dark foreboding slipped into his conscious, and his unease caused him to re-calculate his risks. After thinking for a moment, he activated his comms, directing his next words at the captain of the fleet of cutters, a man by the name of Maurice Angstrom. “Delta, break escort and return to the edge of the blind spot. I’ve got a funny feeling about this, and I don’t like it.”

“You sure sir?” came the reply, “If we do that we won’t be able to support Alpha, should the necessity arise.”

“Yeah, I’m sure, there’s something fishy going on, and I’d rather have you on hand in case something shows up. We really can’t afford to allow them to damage the jump core.

As Vesper watched, the cutters peeled off, turning around and burning back the way they came, no long restrained by the slower carrier and battleships. The feeling didn’t go away, but Vesper pushed it down. Alpha was almost within interdiction distance of the lone Demon Corp Fleet, and the last thing he needed was to be second-guessing himself at a crucial time like this.

It was often said that the outcome of a battle was decided in the first thirty seconds of the conflict. What commands were given during the ten second lull directly after interdiction, while the hyperdrives were cooling and the sublight engines were coming online, and during the first twenty seconds of maneuvering. Vesper was a firm believer in this philosophy, having won and lost his fair share of skirmishes, and each time noticing that same pattern within each.

A red light began to flash as a countdown was initiated on the overhead panel. “Interdiction in t-minus 10 seconds.” Sybil’s voice echoed over the bridge, her voice eerily calm. Vesper brought up the feed from the relay, currently nothing but static, and enlarged it in preparation for the coming scuffle. “Interdiction in t-minus 5…4…3…2…1…interdiction initiated.”

A few seconds later, the relay feed’s static faded, revealing a view of the battleground from a vantage point that was behind and offset from the ships of his fleet. Though the view of his own fleet was good, more importantly it displayed the ships of the aggressor fleet in high definition, a diagnostic bracket appearing around each. Vesper quickly scanned the fleet, listing off the ships in his head just before they appeared on the overhead console, an act he was sure Maeve was emulating from her command ship.

Two Basilisk Cutters, four Covenant Cruisers, two Hellfire Battleships, two Damocles Destroyers, and a Valhalla Carrier. A seemingly powerful but pretty generic Demon Corp fleet, especially if the shields, armor, and weapons were up to snuff. However, the fact that the carrier was one of VSec design, instead of the newer, more powerful DC design suggested that the Corp was running low on resources. This fleet had clearly been slapped together in a hurry. While this would make Maeve’s job easier, it deepened the intrigue of the whole situation and further assured Vesper that there was something afoot that he wasn’t yet aware of. His uneasy feeling intensified, he hated being in the dark, especially when the lives of his crews were on the line.

“Delta, fall back to the halfway point for the sensor blackout, disperse in an even ring around the base, and begin patrolling. Drain power from your weapons to boost your sensors, and stream your sensor data to us. Keep your shields at maximum, however, and make sure your emergency capacitors charged—I don’t want you getting caught off guard.” Vesper turned to Sybil, still standing by Sargon’s console. “Overlay the base sensor’s data with that from Delta. That’ll clear up at least some of the blind spots, and the cutters are fast enough that nothing will be left in the dark for long.”

Glancing at his sector display, he saw the arrow representing Delta move back into the blind spot, before splitting up into 6 smaller arrows that began taking positions around the base.

He turned his attention back to the battle with the DC fleet, and saw that the battle had already started. It was going as well as could be expected, which was to say, the Demon Corps fleet was quickly getting reduced to scrap metal and sparking circuitry. Vega ships were usually piloted by AI, as they lacked the manpower to crew all their ships. This AI was exceedingly stupid, however, and typically piloted the fleet in a head-on charge towards whatever they were pointed at. This allowed for the aggressor to “kite” them, effectively staying out of their range while firing back at them all the while. It only really worked well with battleships, and less effectively with cruisers, but when executed properly, it was one of the most devastating strategies employed by the Rebel forces. The Basilisks were already down, and the cruisers were next in the firing line, with the first two already taking damage. Any Mark V cutter resisted stasis effects such as those applied by the NET Torpedoes, but the Basilisks had been mere Mark I’s, and as a result had been slowed and torn apart.

The lack of upgrades and the frankly pathetic equipment meant that the fleet as a whole was getting shredded even faster than he had originally expected. This, combined with everything else going on, fully convinced him that something was afoot. If only he could figure out what…

He observed the battle a few moments longer, watching two of the cruisers erupt into enormous fireballs. As his battleship’s torpedoes began battering the last two cruisers, he noticed that they were dealing far less damage, only whittling their shields down instead of dropping them and ripping into the ship itself. As his confusion grew, a shockwave rocked the bridge as the scene was bathed in a sickly green glow and he heard a gasp from behind him. His stomach dropped and he whipped around.

An unstable wormhole was whirling and pulsating beyond the glass of the viewport, closer to the base than he had ever seen before. Vesper felt the color drain from his face as he figured out what the Demon Corp had been playing at. He looked back at the viewscreen, and felt his heart sink further as two more Basilisk Cutters, both Mark V and clearly armed to the teeth, sped out from behind the carrier, where they had been concealed by its bulk.

Of course. How could he have been so stupid? They knew that the Demon Corp had been capable of controlling the alien’s actions in the past, whether through negotiation or extortion, they didn’t know. With an asset like that, what better way to assault a troublesome rebel base than lure its fleets out to battle with what appeared to a poorly equipped fleet, only to reveal a far more powerful fleet laying beneath the scapegoats. Then aliens, with their powerful organic technology, laid siege to the exposed base. Still, it could have been worse, he supposed, as he had enough foresight to recall the cutters instead of committing them to the fleet attack. In addition, the Demon Corp fleet had sacrificed a large amount of power for stealth, and he knew that Maeve was a Captain to be reckoned with, so he wasn’t too worried about her. She’d be on her way back soon enough, and the cutters were already on their way back. Sargon must have notified them. Meanwhile, the base’s compliment of enormous artillery was turning to bear on the nearby wormhole, ready to fire on whatever emerged from it. Things may not be great, but they were certainly winnable.

Then the base shuddered, groaned, and began to slowly drift towards the swirling vortex.

Vesper felt a cold hand clench around his heart. They weren’t trying to damage the base, destroying a few modules to send a message. They wanted it gone, permanently. He had seen the horrifying state of the Infected Outposts, the remnants of the Colony 47 sector, human modules overgrown with vile green matter, pulsating disgustingly.

No, they didn’t want to destroy his base.

They wanted to consume it.

His eyes widened and he keyed his comms, speaking fervently. “Delta, we need you here now. Alpha, try and finish that up as soon as possible, I don’t care if you have to take some damage doing it, just get back here as soon as you can.”

“Why?” Maeve responded, “What’s going on?”

“You saw the wormhole?” Vesper asked.

“How could I miss it? It’s the only one in the entire sector, and it’s not like they’re exactly subtle.”

“We’re getting pulled in.”

Maeve swore colorfully. “Hold on, we’ll be right there.” Before Vesper cut the connection, he heard her directing her commanders. “Come about 45 degrees. Let’s give them an excellent view of our gunports…”

Vesper turned his attention to Sargon. “Bring in the outlying modules, close as you can manage to the bridge. If we end up going through that wormhole I don’t want anything left behind.” Sargon nodded, beginning to issue commands of his own.

Vesper looked to Sybil, waiting expectantly for orders. “Lower the blast shields, and engage module shields. I expect the guns to be ready to fire the instant something comes out of that wormhole.” Sybil nodded, and a moment later the blast doors dropped over the windows. After a moment a holographic display superimposed itself over the walls, creating the illusion of windows. The section depicting the wormhole enlarged, magnifying the roiling vortex as data on it began rolling across the periphery of the screen. A second later an audible hum began to vibrate the deckplates, and all over the base faint red outlines sprang to life around each of the modules.

Vesper frowned, thinking fast. The aliens weren’t going to bother attacking if they didn’t need to, and at that thought the beginnings of a plan began to coalesce in his mind’s eye.

“Sybil, activate maneuvering thrusters to try and slow our fall into the wormhole, draw power from shields to get it done.” Sybil nodded, and Vesper once again activated communications to Delta. “Prep your tow cables, and once you get here, I want you to secure them to the base. Spread out so the force isn’t focused all in one spot, but once you’re secure, try to pull us away. We only need to stay out of the wormhole long enough for Maeve to get back, as the drive will be finished charging by then. I expect that once they figure out what we’re up to, they’ll send out some friends, but the base turrets will give you as much cover as they can. You can try and deal some damage of your own, but make sure to shunt most of your power into your engines and shields. We can assume that the long-range communication jamming that usually accompanies their ships will be present as well, so once we’re engaged, we won’t be able to communicate with Maeve. The relay will be able to track her progress, though.”

“Yes sir,” Maurice affirmed, “We’re almost there.”

“Sybil, I want to fire a premature volley at the wormhole just before the cutters attach cables—see if we can’t catch a few of them just outside the wormhole. I know that we can’t get anything through to the wormhole itself, since the energy of any weaponry entering it is sapped almost immediately. However, once they’re past that point they’re going to be vulnerable. Hold the strike craft in reserve though, don’t scramble them until we’re sure we need them.” In response, a chorus of _chnk-clunk_ ’s were heard across the base as the massive turret projectiles were chambered, ready to be hurled at whatever aggressor emerged from the wormhole.

A resonant _crack_ signaled the arrival of a cutter, quickly echoed by five more as the rest appeared as well. They quickly spread out over the base, waiting to be cleared to fire their tow cables, as well as overcharging their shields in preparation for the pounding they expected to take.

Vesper took a deep breath, before exhaling sharply. “Fire volley.”

With a high-pitched whine, the first turret emptied its capacitors into the rails of the barrel, sending an immense slug shrouded in blue plasma hurtling towards to the wormhole with a throaty _shoomp_. It was quickly followed by the numerous other turrets scattered across the base, creating a rippling wave of blue destruction. Vesper counted to three after the last turret fired, then nodded to Sybil, who signaled the cutters. Amid the sounds of the turrets reloading, there came six distinct _thump_ s as the cutters fired their tow cables. As soon as the connections were secure, the oversized engines on the strike craft flared to life, and the base shuddered, slowed, then began to reverse away from the wormhole.

A chorus of cheers broke out among the bridge crew, and Vesper allowed himself a small smile of satisfaction, though they weren’t quite out of the woods yet.

As if in response to his thoughts, the wormhole flashed, and alien ships began to boil out of the rift like oversized angry bees. They scarcely had time to clear the protective field surrounding it before his pre-fired volley smashed into them. Vesper’s eyes widened, he had never seen so many at once; clearly they did not want him to get away. A few ships spun out of control and exploded, but the majority of them kept coming, like a green horde of locusts.

“Another volley, then commence individual paired firing, trying to focus fire those that are weakest. The sooner we silence their guns, the better.” Another volley thundered out towards the oncoming swarm, which seemed heedless to the assault, not even attempting to maneuver out of the way. This peculiar action struck Vesper as odd, even as more alien ships detonated. They almost always did their best to avoid incoming fire, and they did so with an unnatural efficiency when they tried. But they weren’t even bothering, flying face-first into a withering hailstorm of superheated plasma. Not only that, but their shots were punching through whatever strange material they were made up of with unusual swiftness. He knew from experience that some of the more dedicated combat craft could take a considerable amount of punishment before going down, which these were clearly not. Perhaps they were banking on their superior numbers to overwhelm him.

The first ships reached firing ranges, and the base began to dissolve into chaos. Green lasers began to flash, and the firing of the turrets became more uneven as they began to track individual target amongst their fellows. Again, their flight pattern was out of the ordinary, as they didn’t spread out and circle the base, focusing on the cutters or combat modules, which Vesper imagined were highest priority targets. Instead, they swarmed in a mass off to one side, firing at whatever was closest. This concentrated mass made easy pickings for the turrets, and a ship knocked out of control would often collide with several others before exploding.

“What are you up to…” Vesper mused, perplexed at why the aliens would bother sending such overwhelming numbers, but then avoid using them to their full potential. All they were _really_ doing right now was eating turret fire…

He looked again, this time taking in the entirety of the battlefield instead of just the ships behavior, and noticed that all the ships were clustered around the side of the base facing the wormhole, obscuring their view of it, almost like they were trying to prevent anything from getting through to the wormhole itself.

Oh no.

Vesper turned to Sargon frantically. “Sargon, launch a relay above the base, now.”

Sargon looked back in confusion. “Sir?”

“Just do it, quickly!”

Sargon spun around and jabbed a button on his console, and another muffled _whump_ was heard as a second relay streaked outward, before turning sharply and rocketing upwards. A few of the alien ships broke away from the swarm and pursued it, subtly confirming what Vesper suspected.

The ships were acting as a screen for something else coming through the wormhole, something they were shielding from the sight and fire of those on the base. Vesper was sure of it, but before the relay cleared the mass of ships, the three chasing it caught up and green beams of destruction incinerated the small craft.

“Again!” Vesper said, dread beginning to form in the pit of his stomach, “Fire multiple in each direction, just get us a view of the wormhole!”

Sargon didn’t question him this time, and Vesper suspected that he was catching on to what might be amiss. A horde of relays shot out from the bridge, scattering in every direction, and the swarm of ships responded, several vessels chasing after each one. However, one of the relays succeeded in running the gauntlet, and was able to send back a few second of footage before its pursuer caught up and the relay evaporated like its fellows.

Those few seconds were all they needed. Emerging from the wormhole was a massive ship, hundreds of times larger than the craft shielding it from view. “Harvester…” Vesper breathed. He had only seen the gargantuan craft a few times before, and each time it had been a harrowing experience. Equipped with strike craft, long-range beams, close-range pulse cannons, and an overload burst that decimated anything that got close, they were a menace to anything unlucky enough to be in their way. And now, there was one bearing down upon them, and the only thing keeping them alive was its slow exit from the wormhole.

“Cease individual firing, and focus on a single point in the swarm. If we put enough shots there, some might get through and hit the harvester,” Vesper ordered, “Synchronize firing, we have a better chance of getting through that way.”

The firing ceased for a moment, then the base vibrated as a collective shot rang out, the blue streaks racing away to impact with the wall of alien ships. “Negative shot penetration,” reported Sargon.

“Again!” ordered Vesper, a tinge of panic coloring his speech. He had seen first-hand the havoc a harvester could wreak, and that was from a respectable distance. Only the cooperative efforts of the most heavily armed and armored fleet were capable of taking on one of the monsters. Even then, the fleets would come out of the battle scarred and smoking, if at all. There were considerable rewards to be gained from defeating one of them, of course, access to some of the most advanced technology the rebels had ever seen, but Vesper valued the lives of his crews too much to risk them on such dangerous missions. He instead traded with other more foolhardy or reckless commanders who has taken on the risk and come out on top of what Vesper was convinced was a cosmic coin flip. He had found that if they got to commanders just after they had defeated a harvester, they were far more receptive to trade deals than they might normally be. They tended to be desperate for the raw materials to rebuild their ships, and even more desperate for pre-built ships. As a result, Vesper had learned to keep a surplus of the favored harvester hunters around, though they never seemed to stay for long. Through this unconventional means of acquisition, Vesper had accrued a respectable collection of alien artifacts and technology. He currently had his engineers studying the various items to see how they might be used, specifically how they might be combined with human technology to create a hybrid breed of tech that offered the best of both worlds. Progress was slow, but promising.

Once again, a barrage of blue bolts streaked out to slam against the swarm. As Vesper watched the disabled alien ships careening uncontrollably, he saw momentary holes open in the screen as the others maneuvered to avoid them, and he got another idea.

“Change firing pattern to fire a third of the turrets in a slight spread, then fire the remaining two-thirds targeted at the center of that spread, two seconds after the first salvo.”

“Yes sir,” came the reply. Now, the waves of blue fire rippled outwards in staggered pattern, and the whole bridge held its collective breath.

The first shots impacted the swarm, and just as before, holes opened in the mass of ships, but this time, the delayed shots soared through the openings. Just before the gaps closed again, Vesper saw blue fire rolling across the bow of the harvester.

Once again cheers rang out across the bridge, even louder than before, and Vesper sighed in relief. Without the protection of the screen, the harvester was vulnerable, especially since the turrets on the base were significantly more powerful than any of those mounted on ships. They had far more powerful, dedicated reactors to draw from, and in addition were simply many times larger. The crew knew that, and with that knowledge came hope.

The aliens knew that too. Now that their secret was out, they wasted no time. Before the turrets had a chance to even reload, the swarm had exploded outwards over the base. Each ship wove around the others in an impossibly intricate pattern that no human pilot could ever hope to achieve as they vied for a firing angle. Although there still existed a screen in front of the harvester, it had shrunk drastically, with only about half of the ships remaining.

Vesper had expected this, though. “Scramble all strike craft!” he ordered, and a moment later hatches all over the base opened, and out of them boiled a swarm of his own. Drones, much like the ones employed by the Dominion carrier, came pouring out of the hatches. However, these drones were also considerably bigger than the ones launched by the Dominion, and there were far, _far_ more of them. The Dominion fielded six units, which was usually more than enough to forcefully disassemble anything Maeve pointed them at. On the other hand, each of the combat modules on the base supported four units, with larger modules, such as the bridge and fleet bay, supporting sixteen. However, all of these paled in comparison to the four dedicated hanger modules spread out across the base. Each one supported twenty four of the units, in addition to broadcasting a fighter support field, increasing the speed, maneuverability, and firepower of any squadrons in range.

Each unit consisted of four bombers escorted by six fighters packing rapid-firing lasers, along with a wolfpack of long-range interceptors equipped with small railguns. The real power of the units lay in the bombers, whose high-yield explosives packed a considerable punch. The other drone’s weapons still hurt, but Vesper had found they did little to the strange compound that made up the hulls of the alien vessels. The energy from the fighters was quickly sapped away, and the small railguns, unlike those on the base turrets, simply didn’t have enough mass to achieve any sort of significant penetration. The explosives, however, melted through the hulls of alien craft like a hot knife through butter.

With the addition of the squadrons, the space around the base quickly dissolved into chaos, a flashing, beautiful lightshow of destruction. The squadrons zipped through the ranks of the aliens, quickly locking on to their target, matching its weaving movements, and then raining destruction down upon the hapless target with a brutal efficiency. Some fell to the chillingly accurate beams of the aliens, especially once the swarm modified its flying pattern to put the besieged ships and their malevolent escorts in front of their fellows, but the beams simply weren’t enough to deal with the sheer amount of drones.

Soon, the space around the base was littered with drifting hulks and debris, as the few surviving ships retreated back towards the relative safety of the screening swarm. The turrets had gotten off a few more volleys since the aliens had begun assaulting the base in earnest, with varying degrees of success. Many of the shots had been intercepted by a circling ship, and as a result, only a few shots had successfully made it through to the harvester. Vesper wasn’t particularly confident that they had dealt anywhere near enough damage to the beast, and he didn’t imagine they had much time before it had fully exited the wormhole. They had to capitalize of the chance they had now.

“Continue firing, same pattern,” Through the holes opened by the latest barrage, Vesper caught a glimpse of the harvester itself, and he realized how far it had progressed out of the wormhole as the shots impacted with the foreboding mass. It wasn’t going to be long before they were out of time. “Recall strike craft, but don’t dock them, have them orbit their home modules instead. Reinforce any lost drones, rearm and refuel those in need, but don’t keep them in the modules for any longer than you must.”

Not very much time indeed. Before the turrets could fire again, the swarm split apart like a flower, and through the center emerged the harvester, its bow warped and mangled from repeated impacts. Vesper’s eyes widened, and he heard Sargon inhale sharply. None of them had ever been this close to one before, and it was a majestic ship. Terrifying, but majestic.

The torn-up bow didn’t seem to really hinder the harvester, as green beams lanced out and struck all the turreted modules in range. They tore through their shields and armor with little effort, piercing through the modules completely and shooting out the other side. One after another they detonated, and the nightmarish vessel turned its attention to the cutters. Instead of wasting time attacking the heavily armored ships, it simply began taking out the tow cables, and with each cable severed, the base began to slow its movement away from the wormhole. With only three lines left, it stalled, and at two it began slip back towards it. Only the shielding bulk of the base saved those final two cables from destruction.

The harvester was apparently content with that, and turned its guns on the cutters themselves. Not to destroy, though, it was systematically incapacitating their engines, and one by one, they began to fall towards the wormhole as well. It seemed like the aliens wanted them as well. All three Basilisks fell quickly, due to their lighter armor and shields, and one of the two Pythons in the firing line only just barely made it under the base with its engine armor intact, while the other began an awkward spiral towards the wormhole.

Despair permeated the bridge at this sudden turn of events, and even Vesper was not exempt. Through it all, he had kept his base and his crew safe, but now, he couldn’t figure out how he was going to get them out of this one.

Unless…

He spun around to look at the readout of the jump core’s readiness. Fully primed and charged. A wild idea had surfaced, and it might just work.

“Sargon, what would happen if the jump core was breached inside the wormhole?”

Sargon looked up, and Vesper saw a glimmer of hope in his eyes. “I’m not sure, unstable jump-cores can do all sorts of things, from exploding to just shutting off, but that’s in normal space. Inside the wormhole, it’s anyone’s guess, but if I was to put money on it, I would guess that it would create a rift in the wormhole. The effects would be interesting to say the least, given that the wormhole is a rift in and of itself. If we could get through that second rift, who knows where we’d end up, but I’m willing to bet it would be somewhere a whole lot nicer than where the aliens intend to take us. If we focused the shields around the jump core, I think we could manage to minimize the damage done to the base as well if it does decide to explode.”

“What about just trying to jump in the wormhole, would that work?” Vesper asked.

Sargon pursed his lips. “Doubtful. As far as we can tell, the aliens use rift technology, tearing open a hole in normal space and travelling whatever exists between realities. The jump core, on the other hand, essentially folds space to make its jumps. Inside the wormhole, I suspect that there won’t be any space to fold, at least, not any space the core would be able to manipulate. We’re definitely sailing some uncharted waters here, but that’s my best guess.”

“Alright, so our best bet is to hope against hope that unleashing chaos will serve us well.” Sargon nodded. Vesper thought for a moment, then asked, “Can any of the turrets we have left turn to fire on the jump core?”

Sargon studied his console. “Yes sir, they can, assuming the harvester doesn’t destroy them as well. If we cease fire then I’d imagine it would leave us alone, as they clearly want the base mostly intact. That would send the message that we’ve resigned to our fates. I’ll have the crews prepare it to fire on the core as soon as we’re in the wormhole.”

“Good,” Vesper acknowledged. His eyes then fell on one of the disabled cutters drifting past the viewport. They were falling towards the wormhole much faster than the base was, due to their smaller size. If they were sucked up before the base managed to get into position and detonate the core, their chance of surviving was next to nonexistent. “Reverse thrust, and tell the remaining cutters to release cables and get the bridge between them and the harvester. Also instruct them to tail us as closely as possible, no matter what happens. If they can use their cables to tow any of the disabled corvettes as well, that would be ideal, but only if they can make it to them without entering the harvester’s firing arc. Hopefully the gravity of the base will attract them toward whatever rift we can make and they’ll get dragged into it as well, though if what you said about space inside the rift is true, I doubt the normal laws of physics will apply there.”

Sybil nodded, and Vesper turned his attention to Sargon. “Prepare a final relay, use the time capsule preset. Key it to Maeve’s encryption, and include logs of what happened since she left. I also want to leave her a final video message. Prepare to record on my mark, then export it to the relay and launch it. Prepare a backup, just in case the aliens see fit to destroy that one as well, though I honestly doubt it.”

Vesper took a moment to compose himself, then nodded at Sargon, who pressed a button on his console, beginning the recording.

“Maeve, you won’t get this until after we’re gone, but I want you to know what happened. Included are station logs, detailing what happened since you launched, but I’m going to give you a general overview. We had originally planned to use the cutter’s tow cables to drag us away from the wormhole in order to give you enough time to get back and for us to jump out. It would have worked, too, if a harvester hadn’t showed up. With the harvester around, we didn’t last long, and with the cutters incapacitated, we’re drifting back towards the wormhole. We’re not going down that easy, though, and we’ve got a plan for escape that just might work. We’re going to be firing upon our jump core as soon as we’re in the wormhole, in the hopes that it influences whatever screwy physics exist in the rift to destabilize the wormhole even further. If we get really lucky, it’ll punch a hole in the wormhole wall itself, and we can pass through that hole out of danger. Or we might just end up in more danger than we started out in. We don’t really know. If we make it out of there alive, we’ll contact you as soon as we can with whatever sector we’re in and try to arrange transport with another base that’ll be jumping there.” He paused as Sargon caught his attention, gesturing at the approaching wormhole. His message was clear: ‘finish now or forever hold your peace,’ Vesper turned his attention back to the recording, and his features softened. “I don’t know if I’m ever going to see you again, but on the off chance that this is goodbye, just know that I couldn’t have asked for a better sister. You’re an amazing person, Maeve, I love you.”

Vesper ended the recording, and with a few button presses, Sargon had it copied to both relays. No more than thirty seconds after Vesper had finished, the first relay rocketed away from the base, and just as he suspected, the remaining aliens didn’t bother it.

Vesper sighed heavily, swallowing the lump in his throat. They had been through thick and thin, the two of them, and as long as they had each other, they had felt invincible. But now things were different. Everything had changed in the space of less than an hour, and their foundations had been rocked to their very core. Vesper wasn’t quite sure what to make of it, if he was honest. He was sad, of course, but there was a deeper feeling to his unhappiness, something he couldn’t quite explain, like he had lost a piece of himself.

He shook himself out of his brief reverie, looking around and quickly taking stock of the situation. Two of the drifting cutters had been snatched by their fellows, and the base’s acceleration had outpaced one of the two remaining drifters. However, the final cutter was still a fair ways ahead of them, flipping end over end as it approached its doom.

The aliens swarm had converged on the harvester again, covering it like a second skin, while the harvester simply maneuvered out of the way to allow the base to pass unimpeded.

Vesper studied the distant cutter. His eyes widened as he recognized the detailing covering the ship’s hull. It was Maurice’s command ship, the _Sanguine Shimmer_. “Is this the fastest we can move?” he asked.

“Under our own power, yes. We could instruct the remaining cutters to fire a secondary cable and tug us towards it, though I’m not sure we could catch it in time with only two cutters assisting. We could also have the tugs try and orient the one they’re towing towards the base so that the disabled cutter can latch on, then attempt to sprint out and grab it.”

Vesper thought for a moment. He didn’t want to risk losing any of his remaining crews on what very well may turn out to be fool errand, but at the same time he didn’t want to leave anybody behind.

“We can’t have the cutters towing us towards the wormhole, they’d know something was up if we seemed too eager, and we can’t risk that. I like the idea of tethering the drifters to the base though, see if they can manage that. If they can, send one of the cutters to retrieve the cutter near the base, as they can stay out of the harvester’s line of sight and therefore out of danger. Send the other to the edge closest to the _Shimmer_ , but don’t allow them to leave the shelter of the base—the harvester would gun them down in seconds. Instead, have them edge as far out as they can as we get further from the harvester and wait until we’re just about to enter the wormhole. Once they’re clear, have them sprint out and latch on, then try and tow it back. We’ll detonate the core, and hopefully they’ll make it back in time. Make sure to communicate to the crew of the sprinter that if any of them do not wish to stay aboard, they can evacuate on some of the escape pods; we’ll have them land in the fleet bay. Sybil can take over some of the functions in the short term if need be.”

Shortly after the commands went out, Vesper’s comm beeped. “Yes?” he asked, having a pretty good idea of who it was.

A hologram appeared in front of him, displaying a dark haired man wearing a haggard expression. “Hello sir, this is Lieutenant McMohan, commander of the _Fickle Flicker_. I’ve talked to the crew, and none of them want to bail, especially not now. Captain Angstrom has gotten us all out of more messes than we can count, and we owe him our lives multiple times over. Besides, none of us would ever dream of abandoning one of our own.” Vesper smiled at this, pleased that his captains valued life as much as he did. “Now, if you’ll pardon my forwardness, let’s go get our commander back.”

“Your valor is to be commended, Lieutenant, pass my approval along to your crew. You’ve had your orders delivered; do you have any questions or desire any clarification?”

‘No sir, they’re pretty straightforward; stay under cover until a reasonably safe run can be made for the _Shimmer_ , get out there, attach tow cable, then haul ass back here.”

“Excellent.” Vesper said, pleased. “Good luck out there.”

His captains always seemed to love getting the last word, and McMohan was no different. He smiled, a small amount of amusement showing through his drawn face. “I’d make some quip about how we don’t need luck, but at this point I’ll take anything I can get. One extra-large order of luck, please.”

Vesper snorted as the connection faded. He truly appreciated the resilience of his crews. Even in the face of overwhelming odds and an escape plan that was just as likely to get them killed as it was to bail them out, they always seemed able to come up with a quip making light of the situation. As long as they could joke, he thought, not everything was truly lost.

The next few minutes were spent in relative silence as they watched the wormhole grow larger. Finally, Sybil broke the silence. “The _Sanguine Shimmer_ has entered the wormhole, commander. We are approximately thirty seconds behind them.”

“Thank you Sybil. Please inform the module crews to secure themselves.” The AI nodded, and Vesper activated his link with the Flicker, which had edged out a fair distance from the base as it moved to eclipse the harvester’s view of the wormhole. “Vesper to McMohan. You’re clear to proceed.”

“Yes, sir.” There was tangible satisfaction in the Lieutenant’s voice as the sleek craft leapt forward, closing the distance between the base and the swirling green vortex in seconds, before vanishing into it.

“Sargon, keep that radio link alive, they can use it as a lifeline to find their way back to the base if need be. Prime Storm Driver number 4 to fire upon the base—you’ll need to override the safety protocols in order to do so. Also instruct all remaining nonessential personnel to make their way to the bridge; we’ll have Sybil run the necessary systems until we’re in the clear. It’ll be taxing, but I think she can manage it for a little while.”

Sargon nodded, and as his fingers flew over his console, the far edge of the base entered the wormhole. A low vibration crept into the periphery of his senses, barely noticeable at first, but slowly growing stronger as more and more of the base was sucked up. As the bridge cleared the miasmic barrier separating the interior of the rift from normal space, the fog that had previously clouded their vision lifted, and Vesper felt his eyes widening again as he beheld the inside of an alien-generated wormhole for the first time.

The inside of the rift in space reflected its unstable nature, and was constantly twisting and undulating in a hypnotic fashion. The walls of the wormhole were clearly unstable as well, crackling with lime-tinted lightning and shot through with temporal cracks, each offering a tantalizing glimpse into a different scene.

A truly massive blue-tinted star, roiling with violent solar winds, a tiny, rapidly spinning neutron star, a lush, verdant planet teeming with life, a black hole, ever hungering, two enormous armadas clashing, weapons flashing and ships exploding, a huge, geometrical object whose function and purpose they could only guess at. Vesper even saw some he recognized, planets with multitudes of bases like his orbiting amidst rich asteroid belts. Each crack offered something different, more places than he could ever visit in a hundred lifetimes all laid out before him.

He mustn’t let them distract him, though. As beautiful as the sights were, the one he knew waited for them at the end of the tunnel was not a place he wanted to visit in any lifetime.

With that in mind, his focus shifted from the dazzling sights to the huge cannon off to his left, now pointed directly at the prominent jump core. The core itself was sparking and arcing at full charge, and Vesper thanked his lucky stars that the harvester hadn’t seen fit to destroy it. This electrical discharge seemed to be exciting the wormhole, as it swirled and flashed even more violently, and Vesper smiled. They were planning on raising absolute hell, and anything that they could do to stir up the oncoming storm even further wasn’t to be passed up.

“I have an idea. Just before we fire, overload the capacitors; it should have some interesting effects if the way the wormhole is already reacting is anything to judge by.”

As the capacitors began to charge, an audible humming filled the air, and as the charge built, their surrounding got more and more twisted. “Sir, look!” exclaimed Sargon, pointing behind them, where the front of the harvester had begun to show through the distant exit of the wormhole. A tiny silver flash caught his eye near the bow of the harvester, but when he couldn’t locate it again, he let it slip from his mind and focused back on the task at hand.

“Ah ha, there’s our audience. Let’s give them a show, shall we?”

“Yes sir, capacitor overload in t-minus 5…4…3…2…1…

With a sound like ripping paper, electricity began to dance along the jump core as the dark matter within was pumped full of electricity, far past safe levels. The dark matter began to agitate, and soon the effects of the increased voltage began to show as the containment fields started to flicker and short out. Wisps of dark matter began to escape, and some of the temporal cracks began to widen.

This was exactly what Vesper had been hoping for. Maybe, with a surge of dark matter, they could pry open one of those cracks wide enough for the base to pass through.

Worth a shot, anyways, they didn’t really have much to lose at this point.

“Fire!” Vesper ordered, a bit more forcefully than he had intended.

With a slight delay that seemed to take years, the cannon spooled up, charging its rails, and then with a blue flash, it hurled its slug straight into the core.

The plasma-shrouded bolt impacted the core, piercing straight through it. As it did so the plasma flickered along the suddenly free dark matter as the containment fields failed, allowing dark matter to stream out of the rupture on both sides. Fortunately, Sargon had ensured that the shields were focused in such a way that they buffeted it safely away from the base. A large cloud, like a great thunderstorm complete with crackling lighting, began to spread out, eclipsing the base in shadow. Electricity, still arcing along the now shattered husk of the defunct jump core, started to jump to the looming cloud. Once there it jumped again, this time to the wall of the wormhole. However, instead of simply arcing and disappearing, the jagged forks of lightning seemed to freeze, creating bridges of writhing blue tendrils. As more and more bridges were established, the cloud of dark matter and whatever strange material made up the walls of the wormhole started to get drawn into the center on the area cordoned off by the electrical tethers. There they began to swirl around each other, refusing to mix, like water and oil. Once the supply of dark matter had been exhausted, all of it drawn into the boiling mass, the bridges of lightning followed suit, sucked into the now completely independent ball of… stuff. As the electricity disappeared into the mass, Vesper noticed that some of the bubbles of dark matter finally joined with the wall material, and all this combined mass was attracted together in the center of the ball. Through the shifting masses of the yet uncombined material, Vesper saw the new material shudder, shift, then stabilize, and in the center of the ball he saw a field of stars.

A portal. Just what they had been hoping for. If they could put enough energy into that cloud they could potentially open a wide enough path for the entire base to make it through. But would they have enough power within the entire base to energize that much material? Hell, would they have enough time before the current of the wormhole swept them past their one chance at escape? Vesper doubted it, especially as he noticed that without a constant supply of electricity the materials were beginning to separate again, and the already small portal was shrinking into nothingness. If only they had some way to turbocharge the ball, pump a vast amount of power into it in a very short amount of time…

Wait.

They did.

Vesper pivoted to look behind them, and through the twisting tunnel of the wormhole, he saw the harvester bearing down upon them. It was now completely within the wormhole and clearly pissed that they were messing with the quantum tunnel.

Well, time to tick it off even more.

“Rotate the base so that the remaining combat modules are directly in front of… that, whatever that is, then resume firing on the harvester.”

“Sir?” Sargon asked, clearly surprised. “Are you sure that’s wise?”

Vesper grinned, a tired and humorless expression. “Quite frankly, Sargon, I’m almost positive it’s unwise, but I don’t think we have that many options open to us right now.”

Sargon snorted, amused, before turning back to his console and inputting a few commands. The base groaned, but began to rotate. Once in position, the great cannons elevated, and resumed firing one last time.

As the reports of the great guns shook the base, Vesper looked to Sybil. “Any news on our intrepid Lieutenant McMohan and his rescue operation?”

“Yes sir, they’ve caught up with the _Shimmer_ and are on their way back now. They hope to be here in no less than 60 seconds, but the current of the wormhole is slowing their progress.”

“Alright, let’s hope they can make it on time.”

He was prevented from saying anything else as the base shook with something that distinctly wasn’t the recoil of a driver. He looked out over the base, and saw the green beam of an alien laser spitting one of their few remaining combat modules on a rod of green energy. The poor module only lasted a few moments under the furious onslaught before exploding like its fellows, but Vesper was more concerned with the beam itself.

Just as he’d hoped, the sheer power of the beam had carried it through the module, and out the other side… directly into the large ball of quantum materials lurking behind the base. The energy of the beam was quickly dissipated, and as the energy was sucked out of it, the portal in the center of the ball quickly began to grow again as the two opposing materials were forced together into an unhappy alliance. Three more beams crackled into the modules and thus, the mass behind them. The portal swelled rapidly, the maw expanding to a colossal size, more than big enough to let the base through.

They were so close to escaping, just a little more…

Without much ceremony the edge of the base slipped into the new portal, and the transition from the green glow of the alien-created wormhole to the dark navy of the rift they had made was surprisingly smooth. For a moment, nothing happened, and Vesper dared to believe that the worst might be over. But of course it couldn’t be that easy.

With a jolt, the lens of stars laid out before them stretched, then shot away, as another tunnel opened before them. This time there were branches in the tunnel, alternate paths that then forked further, creating a huge number of possible routes.

“Try and keep us on a straight heading, follow the stars we saw when we entered! I have no idea where those other channels lead and I don’t want to risk finding out! Keep that radio signal alive, the _Flicker_ will never find us if they don’t have something to follow!”

Vesper was immensely glad that the base’s maneuvering thrusters worked in whatever strange in-between they were in now, as they careened down what was essentially a cosmic waterslide. The calmness from earlier had been replaced with a violent shaking, and Vesper soon began to hear disturbing radio chatter between some of his dispatchers and the tethered cutters not currently under their own power.

The cables were shaking lose, and there was nothing they could do to stop it. With a shrieking sound of tearing metal, the first unlucky ship was wrenched away from the base it had been clinging to tightly to a moment earlier. For a moment it hung there, suspended, but then it was gone, sucked down one of the branching paths.

“No!” Vesper howled, slamming a fist onto the arm of his chair, making his displays flash. They had been so close, and now, those crews were gone.

One by one, the cables tethering the unpowered cutters gave out, and one by one they disappeared down separate paths, never to be seen again. One by one, his crews, his family, disappeared from his life, and one by one, they tore out a part of his heart and took it with them as they vanished from his life.

Vesper was shaken from his grieving reverie when someone shouted, “Sir, look!”

Vesper spun, a beheld a magnificent sight. Battling its way towards them was the _Fickle Flicker_ , and behind it, swinging from an intact tow cable, was the _Sanguine Shimmer_. Both looked a little worse for wear, but both also definitely in one piece. Cheers rose up from the bridge, and despite of himself, Vesper smiled. Against all odds, McMohan and his crew had found their way back to them.

They weren’t the only ones who had found them, however, and Vesper’s smiled faltered as the ugly shape of the harvester took shape behind the two cutters. The cheers died quickly, and Vesper heard Sargon mutter bitterly, “They just don’t give up, do they?”

Normally his cutters wouldn’t have any trouble outrunning the monstrous machine, but the _Flicker’s_ engines were moving twice the mass they usually did. It was making all the difference, as the harvester slowly gained on the two forlorn shapes connected by what now seemed like a feeble cobweb.

As the gargantuan alien ship loomed over the two cutters, Vesper felt his hands clench. He couldn’t do anything, he was a helpless spectator to whatever perverse actions the harvester might take.

“Don’t you dare, don’t you even think about it,” he muttered under his breath.

But the harvester dared. It seemed that it wished to isolate the ships in whatever place they ended up, or perhaps it was relishing its victory and rubbing it in Vesper’s face. Perhaps both. For whatever reason, instead of just shooting out the engines of the _Flicker_ , disabling both ships, it targeted the cable, severing the connection and sending the _Shimmer_ spinning down another path, before turning its guns on the engines of the _Flicker_.

This was its mistake, however, as without the extra load, the now unburdened cutter shot forward and before long, it was out of the range of the harvester and safely sheltered under the mass of the bridge.

“Sir!” Another call took his attention off the slowly approaching harvester and forward, to where the lens had halted, and now was growing larger by the second. They had finally reached the end of the tunnel.

With a bone jarring _wham_ , the base slid out of the tunnel and back into what appeared to be normal space. After he had picked himself up out off of the floor, Vesper shook his head, clearing it and regaining his bearings. Without pause, he dusted himself off and turned back to regard the tunnel, and more unpleasantly, the harvester that was just beginning to exit.

Vesper sighed and closed his eyes, massaging his temples. It had been a good run, and they had managed to survive much longer than he had really expected. But that harvester had proven more tenacious than anything had a right to be, and he was sure that its first order of business was going to be to blow them to kingdom come. He couldn’t stop that. He had tried everything, every trick in the book, but in the end, it hadn’t been enough. He should probably say something to the crew, some uplifting speech, but he was just too tired…

“Sir, look!” an excited voice rang out, and his eyes snapped open. The harvester was still only around halfway out of the portal, and showing no signs of stopping, but the portal itself…

It was closing. Fast.

Faster than the harvester could ever hope to escape it, and Vesper doubted very much that it was going to come out of that situation unscathed.

Hope blossomed in his chest, and he couldn’t help grinning like a kid in a candy store. “Move us away from the portal, fast as you can, we don’t want to be caught in whatever is about to go down.”

The base continued moving away from portal as the edges of the rift closed around the harvester. Then they were moving past the edges of the ship, and a trail of explosions followed them inward. Nothing happened for a moment, and then the entire front of the harvester tilted downwards, revealing nothing beyond it.

It had been cut clean in two. The portal had been reduced to a small pinprick that glinted innocently in the light of the destruction it had just caused, sparkled for a moment, then vanished. A rippling shockwave shot out from where it once was, slicing the already halved harvester into quarters, and sheering the remains of the jump core clean off the top of the bridge.

Then, stillness.

Vesper exhaled experimentally, and when nothing exploded, he breathed a little easier. He turned and sat back down in the command chair, slumping a little.

“Well, that was quite a ride. Whenever we can get them, I’d like a damage report and a list of all those who were killed or went missing delivered to me. No rush, an endeavor like that takes a little while to recover from.”

Before he could say anything else, another alarm began to blare, and he sighed irritably.

“Oh now what?” he grumbled, sitting up straighter. “Can’t we catch a break for just a little while?”

“Nothing major sir,” Sargon replied, “On our preliminary scan of the area we picked up another ship, and it appears to have acquired targeting locks. There’s something a little different about this one though, sir. You should come take a look.”

Vesper groaned, but stood up and walked over to Sargon’s console, leaning over him to look at the readout of the ship. It was unlike anything he’d ever seen before: small, sleek, with clean, angular lines, but clearly built for war. As he watched numerous hatches all over the ship opened, and weapons sprouted from the voids within.

“Have our two remaining cutters make themselves known, but don’t show any signs of aggression. I don’t really want to start shooting with something in the shape we’re in, especially without knowing the capabilities of the craft.” He paused, considering the vessel. “Do we have visual?”

“Yes sir, to your right.”

Vesper straightened and looked, and sure enough, a small ship was holding position just off the starboard side of the bridge. As he watched the two cutters glided in on either side of bridge, sandwiching the vulnerable spot between hundreds of tons of armor.

Vesper’s eyes then slid from the small ship to the starscape behind it. It was like nothing he had ever seen. No familiar constellations, no immovable stars that always appeared in the same area no matter what sector you were in. Nothing.

“Uh, Sargon?”

“Yes sir?”

“Where exactly are we?”

Sargon looked to his console, the preliminary scan now completed, and his brow furrowed. “I can’t rightly say, commander, the computer can’t pick up any recognized systems, and there isn’t any sort of radio chatter either. Even out in deep space, you could always pick up a thing or two, but now there’s nothing. Complete silence.”

Vesper nodded absently. After everything that had happened, he wasn’t a-t all surprised by this turn of events.

“Well, I’ve gotta say, it sure doesn’t look like we’re in Kansas anymore.

* * *

**This chapter was based on the game VEGA Conflict, a game that could have been so good if it wasn't for the all-consuming greed of the publisher. It started so strong, but as time went on it just devolved into one of the most egregious forms of borderline extortion I've ever seen. Even so, I had fun while it lasted, and it had just enough story to peak my interest, but not too much as to leave me feeling like I had nothing to fill in. Cheers.**


	2. Out of the Frying Pan

**This was actually written something like two years ago, but I couldn't ever bring myself to edit it, and even less inclined to publish it without a least a _little_ bit of editing. Finally got around to it while putting off an English project that I really don't want to do.**

* * *

She’d never get sick of flying.

The roar of the engines, the hum of the shields, the report of the weapons, all sounds of a well-tuned and efficient machine. Her well-trained ear could pick up the slightest variation in the pitch of her ship’s systems, alerting her to any potential problems, but right now, the purring of the great construct was unmarred by such anomalies.

Even years after she had first started flying, the feeling of such a machine filled her with exhilaration. It granted her a freedom unmatched, allowing her to eke out an existence among the stars however she saw fit. Unburdened by laws and unrestricted by bureaucracy, it was a life like no other, and she took full advantage of it. She lived her life to the fullest, balancing work and play, but always seeming to revel in the trouble she managed to stir up.

And who said one couldn’t work and play at the same time?

Jasmine whooped as another Raider ship, this one a Cobra Mk. IV, detonated under the furious onslaught of her guns.

She wasn’t really sure why she had been contracted to eliminate the pirate cell, something about “stolen assets”. In her eyes, as long as she got paid she didn’t really care who she was told to kill. She assumed the cell had earned the title of “Raiders”, and their ships certainly looked the part, covered in rusty spikes of scrap metal. She supposed she couldn’t really judge their choice of employment, as she had played pirate in the past. Granted, if anyone tried to get near the clean lines of her ship with any of that horrific scrap, they’d quickly earn themselves an up-close inspection of the barrel of her pistol, accompanied by a sugary suggestion to depart post-haste.

The pirates did seem to be dumb enough to try such a stunt though, judging from their choice of ships. While they were all covered in that horrid rusty metal, her well-trained eye could recognize the ships underneath and she was not all that impressed with their selection. While they certainly weren’t poorly equipped, their ships weren’t anything to write home about, a motley assortment of Eagles, Cobras, and Vipers, with even a few basic Sidewinders sprinkled in. Even worse, they appeared to have swallowed the cooperation’s advertisements regarding the “upgraded” Viper and Cobra models, as the Mk IVs outnumbered the older Mk IIIs. On paper, the updated versions were more suited to combat than their predecessors, with heavier armor and better hardpoints. However, the maneuverability lost due to this bulk was sorely missed, and oftentimes the heavier armor wasn’t enough to soak up the pounding that might otherwise have been avoided. In practice, it was far smarter to try and avoid damage than to absorb it.

These clunky raiders were a far cry from the smooth profile of her Federal Corvette, a purpose-built warship that excelled at what it was designed to do: kill. It was one of the “Big Three”, three ships of comparable size and configuration. The Anaconda was a more versatile ship, boasting more flexibility and jump range, while the Imperial Cutter was a more elegant ship that would beat the Corvette in both speed and carrying capacity. However, neither could hold a torch to the punishment a Corvette could dish out, given its superior maneuverability and weaponry. It may have lacked the sweeping lines of the Imperial ship, but there was a certain dangerous sleekness to the utilitarian militarism displayed in its frame that Jasmine appreciated.

Of course, the equipment could only get one so far. If you didn’t know how to fly, it didn’t matter how powerful your shields were or how big your guns were. These tools only augmented the most potent weapon in a pilot’s arsenal: their mind. Even then, the actual skill involved in piloting was only a piece of a larger puzzle. A large piece, but a piece nonetheless. If one didn’t have an intimate knowledge of each of the intricate facets surrounding piloting, they were already at a disadvantage. These pirates, for instance, were clearly lacking in the mental department, and Jasmine was taking full advantage of it.

She had already noticed their inexperience showing in their ship choice, but now that inexperience was blossoming into full-blown stupidity as she observed them fly. She watched as two of the Raider ships collided, their pilots clearly not aware of themselves and their vessels. She idly wondered how they had managed to make enough of a name for themselves to warrant the attention of the system authorities. Probably had relied on sheer numbers and intimidation, if she was honest, as that was the only thing they had on their side. No quality ships, no advanced tech, and certainly no piloting skill.

Jasmine, on the other hand, had it all in spades. She had been flying combat missions for years and had grown up in the cockpit. Flying was like walking to her: effortless. In fact, it had been argued that she flew better than she walked, something she attributed to the long hours sitting in the pilot’s chair. Her ship was top of the line, but it was the equipment that truly made it shine. While her shielding, armor, weapons, and modules were all best in class, she had also sought out the reclusive engineers scattered across the galaxy. These people were geniuses in their own right, capable of enhancing her equipment to levels far past their factory norms, once they were properly appeased.

She wove through the pirates with reckless abandon, indiscriminately blowing up one after another. To their credit, the pirates kept at her with a dogged determination, but in the end, spirit could only get them so far. Soon enough there was nothing left of them but a field of debris, slowly spinning through the void. Jasmine slowly cruised through the wreckage, salvaging what she could from the destroyed ships. As she set her eye on one of the last worthwhile tidbits, someone spoke behind her, the sleepiness in their voice doing nothing to disguise the resigned irritation that colored their words.

“Couldn’t you have at least warned me before you started shooting? It’s not like we’re exactly secured in the bunks, and getting unceremoniously thrown out of my bed is not on my list of favorite ways to get woken up.”

Her co-pilot, gunner, best friend, and personal peanut gallery, Alenka, stood in the hatchway to the cockpit, leaning tiredly on the doorframe. Alenka cut a very different figure from Jasmine. While Jasmine was short and carried herself with a lethal efficiency, Alenka was tall and graceful. Short black hair framed a round face, and her curves accentuated all the right places. Even so, there was no one Jasmine would rather have at her back in a firefight than Alenka, as though the girl certainly didn’t look it, she was a superb marksman and could easily hold her own in a brawl. Jasmine smiled sheepishly, rubbing the back of her neck, embarrassed.

“Sorry, I meant to wait for you to wake up, but they showed up earlier than I had anticipated, and things… uh… escalated. Quickly.”

Alenka raised an eyebrow as she flopped into her own chair, exhaling heavily. “And I’m to believe that you had absolutely nothing to do with it; that you did everything in your power to avoid getting dragged into the situation?”

“They called my ship ugly! They should have known better than to insult someone who carries weapons the size of their whole ship!”

“Right.” Alenka rolled her eyes, clearly unimpressed with the excuse. “So you shot at them first. Don’t you think you could have at least pinged me, ‘Hey, duck and cover, these fools boutta eat laser’?”

“I…” Jasmine opened her mouth, shut it, then sighed. “Yeah alright, you got me. I’ll try and warn you next time.”

“Here’s hoping. Now, if I recall correctly, the contract required us to eliminate the pirates _and_ destroy their base of operations. How’re you fairing on the second part?”

“Umm, I only just finished, so I haven’t had a chance to trace their FSD wakes yet.” Jasmine replied, “You wanna do that while I finish up here?”

“Sure thing.”

Jasmine glanced at her scanner, decided that there wasn’t anything else hidden in the remains to bother with, and set off for the edge of the field. She deftly slipped through the drifting husks, avoiding the larger pieces while smaller fragments pinged off her shields. Alenka’s fingers flew over the console, calibrating the scanner for a high-power, long-range pulse, and balancing the ship’s systems to compensate.

“Ready to scan once we’re free of the debris field,” she informed Jasmine, who nodded absently as she swung around the carcass of a Viper.

“Almost out. You know, looking at their state of affairs, one has to wonder where all that money that they stole went,” Jasmine mused, “It certainly didn’t go into their ships, but judging from the bounty placed on them, what they made off with wasn’t some worthless trinket.”

“Who knows,” Alenka responded, “I suspect we’ll find the bulk of their investment when we get to their home base, but until then I imagine it will have to remain a mystery.”

The ship passed the final drifting hulk, and Jasmine slammed the throttle forward, keying the ship’s boost. The capacitors shunted power to the engines and the ship shot forward, quickly leaving the battleground behind. Alenka triggered the scanner, and the path the pirates had taken appeared on their HUDs after a few seconds.

Given the average intelligence of the Raiders she had just encountered, Jasmine had honestly expected their base to lie within the same system. A dumb move to be sure, pirating in one’s own backyard, but not something she would put past the group she had just encountered. However, the FSD signal pointed at a distant pinprick of light, leading them out of the system. Clearly, they were based elsewhere, and Jasmine felt a prickle of unease. A move like that suggested intelligence behind the pirate’s capers, and if there was something she hated it was an unknown variable.

Then she chuckled to herself. If she kept this up she might start thinking that an evil mastermind was pulling the strings behind the scene. She wasn’t one for paranoia, in her line of work you couldn’t afford it. Caution _maybe_ , if there was something really important at stake, but even that sucked the fun out of living. She shook her head and focused back at the task at hand, keeping the ship oriented in the right direction as the Frame Shift Drive charged up.

But the small doubt didn’t go away.

With a roar the drive activated, pressing the two back in their seats as the ship accelerated to unimaginable speeds, crossing the void between stars in seconds. They dropped back into normal space, Jasmine circling the star a few times to refuel as Alenka activated the scanner again.

Again the trail led them out of the system, and the one after that. As they continued tracking the signal, Jasmine again felt a pang of uncertainty. This wasn’t typical Raider behavior. Most of them were too stupid to bother leaving their home system, and those that did rarely ventured more than one or two jumps out. They were already four jumps out, and still going.

Finally, just as Jasmine was beginning to wonder if the charged particles that made up the ship’s trail would dissipate before they found the base, they jumped into a system dominated by the eerie glow of the rapidly spinning pulsar ahead of them.

“Of course they set up around a neutron star,” Jasmine grumbled, “It’s always one of two stars with pirates. They either go with a red giant cause they’re edgy blood pirates or a neutron star cause they’re edgy shadow pirates.”

“Don’t forget the extra edgy ones who like their black holes,” Alenka quipped, “Don’t you know they’re a cut above the rest simply on the merit that they’re hardcore enough to live in the vicinity of a black hole?”

Jasmine snorted. “Being in the vicinity of a black hole isn’t inherently dangerous. I mean, a neutron star is just as dangerous. Plus, if you’re in a neutron star system you can supercharge your FSD if you want to.”

“You know, with all the jumps between where you woke me up and here, in addition to their choice of system to base from, I’m starting to think that whoever’s running the show isn’t as dumb as we first thought,” Alenka said, poking at her console, before frowning and sharing her data with Jasmine. “Though I daresay that base certainly doesn’t invoke any ideas of quality or intelligence.”

Jasmine looked at her own console as the scan data appeared, and was inclined to agree with Alenka’s assessment. The majority of the base itself appeared to be carved into an asteroid, but some run-down, dilapidated structures surrounded the mailslot.

“Jeez, with all the stuff they stole, one would think they could at least spring for a facelift.” Jasmine commented snidely, “But best to make sure. Scan for any anomalous readings, power surges, shielding signatures, targeting scanners, proximity mines, the works. Even though the base looks like it would fall apart if they tried firing anything connected to it, best to make sure before we fly in there.”

“Already on it,” came the reply, as the scanner was reconfigured for a long-range, tight beam targeted at the base and surrounding asteroids. Soon enough, data began to flow through their HUDs, showing… absolutely nothing.

Nothing out of the ordinary, at least. There were the usual signals that generally emanated from a base such as that; readings like life support, ship maintenance units, foundries, fabricators, and communication arrays. There also appeared to be a few picket ships circling the base, and the faint hints of weaponry on the base itself.

Jasmine tightened the scanner beam even further, zeroing in on the signatures of the ships and turreted weaponry. Once again, she wasn’t impressed with the pirate’s ships of choice, and even less impressed by the weapons scattered across the surface of the asteroid itself. The ships didn’t seem to be any different than the ones she had just destroyed, a motley mix of Sidewinders, Eagles, Cobras, and Vipers, with the exception of a battered old Python. The Python was by no means a bad ship; quite the opposite, in fact. It dominated the mid-sized ship bracket, but that was due to its versatility. It could hold its own in a fight, but was almost always outdone by the more combat-oriented ships in its weight class. The years also hadn’t been kind to this particular Python, and Jasmine didn’t suspect that it would pose much of a threat in its current condition.

Much like its ships, the base itself didn’t look like much, and its array of defenses didn’t help that image any. The defenses consisted of almost entirely of kinetic weaponry, and Jasmine imagined that was due to the difficulty of maintaining the sensitive optics of lasers. An especially significant hurdle for these Raiders. It took brains to fine-tune a laser’s focusing array to deadly perfection, and brains didn’t seem to characterize these pirates. The base bristled with a hodgepodge of multi- and fragment-cannons, missile launchers, minelayers, and large-caliber slug-throwers. An impressive display, to be sure, but it lacked the variety necessary to be truly effective. Kinetic projectiles were excellent at ripping through ship hulls but weren’t particularly good at depleting shields. Lasers were the opposite, cutting through shields with ease, but dealing very little damage to the hull itself once the shields were down. Judging from the scans, there was very little in the way of shield countermeasures, with only a few basic pulse lasers scattered across the surface. In addition, the firing arcs of all the turrets were poorly distributed, with large blind spots in their coverage that Jasmine could and would take advantage of.

“Hey Alenka?” Jasmine asked, her eyes never leaving the readout, “What in the way of explosives do we currently have?”

Alenka keyed into their current inventory, scanning it quickly. “Not a whole lot. A few missiles, fewer mines; right now the only explosives that we aren’t hurting for are Pack-Hound munitions. We also have some base components, that could be refined in something, I suppose…” She trailed off.

“What’s that, Alenka?” Jasmine asked, intrigued by the lapse in conversation.

“When did we get ahold of all this magnesium and polonium?” Alenka asked, her brow furrowing.

“If we didn’t have any beforehand, I guess it would have had to have come from the band we just dealt with. They must have been in the middle of raiding, which I guess isn’t really surprising. What kind of explosives can we throw together with what we’ve got?”

“Well, we could make some interesting incendiary-type missiles with that magnesium, sending those through the mailslot would probably be a bad day for anything inside. We have stores of conventional high-explosives for the Pack-Hounds, so that’s not an issue.” Alenka paused, a devilish gleam coming into her eyes. “In addition, we have materials enough to make one cold-fusion warhead, and of course, we’ve still got the antimatter torpedo that we got ahold of a few months back.”

Jasmine recalled the particular contract that had gotten them the enormous explosive that currently sat in the middle of her cargo hold, held aloft by the magnetic suspension system that Jasmine had installed specifically for it. They had been required to escort a convoy of ships carrying advanced research prototypes, and their reward had been singular. One of the prototypes they had been escorting. Jasmine had been surprised to say the least when the beast had been wheeled out to her ship, but then again, it had been a busy mission. Plenty of people had wanted the cutting-edge tech the convoy carried, and none of them had asked politely. Jasmine and Alenka had sent the smart ones packing, and the dumb ones to meet their maker. The torpedo had clearly been a loyalty bribe, and to be fair, it had worked, especially after Jasmine had demanded the blueprints and specifications for the weapon. Jasmine and Alenka had spent a fair amount of time over the ensuing weeks running missions for the research lab. The lab, in turn, had kept their accounts filled and ships state of the art, even beyond what the Engineers could provide. One of the most recent additions was a hot-swap system for the hardpoints, allowing the ship to switch weapons on the go instead of having to return to port. The surplus weaponry they carried as a result had cut down on their cargo space somewhat, but it more than paid for itself with the added versatility it gave them. With it, Jasmine had an even greater edge over those she fought.

Now that she thought about it, the lab had actually commissioned them for this job as well. The pirates had hit a few too many supply ships on their way to the remote outpost, and the director of the establishment wasn’t interested in risking starvation. Or at least, so she had heard. They had gotten the mission from a different officer than they usually dealt with, some shipping and supply officer, but the credits were real enough.

Jasmine brought her thoughts back to the task at hand. Inventorying explosives, right. She thought for a moment, then decided on a course of action.

“Hey Alenka, how much of a bonus do you think we could get if we simply cleared the base out instead of destroying it outright?” she asked.

Alenka looked at her, puzzlement clear on her face. “I don’t follow.”

Jasmine made a sweeping gesture with her hand. “Think about it. Once we clear out the Raiders, there’s just a vacant asteroid base out here, just waiting to be exploited. That’s a very well-off research division, I imagine that they could easily find a use for such a base, in addition to being able to front to cash required to fix it up. We provide them with the location for a new research outpost that no one knows about. They get a new top-secret installation, and we get a major payday. Plus, if we play our cards right, we could lobby that we’re the only ones permitted to run supplies to such a base, to maintain confidentiality or something. I daresay that would keep us busy for quite some time, and whenever we get bored of running supplies, we could hire subcontractors to do it for us. Even if the lab doesn’t want the base, I would guess that we could easily find someone who would, or we could keep it for ourselves and make our own little haven.”

Alenka nodded thoughtfully. “Yeah, I see where you’re coming from; could be a good idea. Those incendiary missiles would be especially useful in clearing out the interior of the base.”

“And if things get too hairy, we can use the cold fusion warhead to blow the base to kingdom come.” Jasmine grinned wolfishly, “Worst thing that could happen is that we only get paid what we originally agreed on.”

“Seems like a solid enough plan,” Alenka agreed.

As Jasmine reached for the throttle, the nagging voice in the back of her mind rose to a fever pitch. There was something off about this whole venture, but she couldn’t figure out what. She paused, weighing her options, considering the information she had. Then, with a shake of her head, she banished the doubt from her mind. She was Jasmine Rose, for goodness sake, and she was about to rock that pirate base to its very foundations.

With that thought in her mind she gunned the throttle towards the base, ready to raise absolute hell.

She flicked her eyes over her hardpoints, deciding whether she would continue using the laser-dominated loadout she was currently using, or if she would swap some of the weapons around. Two of her smallest hardpoints were almost always a rail gun engineered to interfere with shield restoration and a missile launcher that forced an FSD reboot in whatever it hit. However, the rest of her loadout varied widely depending on what she was intending to do. She decided that she would assault the base in two stages, first dealing with the picket ships and then moving in on the base itself, changing her loadout for each stage appropriately.

With that decided, she decided to run with a mixed loadout. She kept the house-sized Class-4 hardpoints as lasers, but swapped the large Class-3 hardpoint for a plasma accelerator and replaced the two mid-sized lasers with rotary auto-cannons. Once the pickets were dealt with, she would swap out the lasers and multi-cannons for more traditional siege hardware in the form of missile launchers and heavy cannons.

A ping sounded as the ship arrived at the dropout point Alenka had programmed and reverted to normal space. It was a fair way out from the base itself, as they hoped to draw out the pickets one by one and destroy them with minimal fuss. It was a tactic they had used before, and it had served them well in the past. Jasmine brought the ship to a stop and waited, sure that her arrival hadn’t gone unnoticed. She figured that once it was verified that she wasn’t a comrade returning, the welcome mat would be laid out in a hail of bullets and beams.

She wasn’t kept waiting long; scarcely thirty seconds passed before a few of the ships turned and came galivanting towards her. She grinned, classic pirate ego, they thought they would be able to deal with whatever foolish ship had encroached on their territory without much trouble. Jasmine would be sure to teach them the error of their ways the only way she knew how: teaching by example. Of course, the pirates wouldn’t live long enough to put her lessons into practice, but that was something of a minor detail in her eyes.

With a series of clacks and the hum of power cells charging up, Jasmine deployed her newly-configured hardpoints. She flicked through her targeting system, chose one of the hapless Sidewinders screeching towards her, and fired the plasma accelerator.

The plasma accelerator was a weapon of immense power, one of the deadliest available to the general population. It superheated a large ball of gas until a soup of fully ionized plasma, like that found in the core of stars, had been created. At this point, a series of magnetic rails hurled the ball at whatever the weapon was pointed at. It wasn’t a very easy weapon to use; there was no gimbal system that could withstand the immense heat generated by the creation of the plasma, and as a result, only fixed variants were distributed. The projectile was also relatively slow, meaning it was rather hard to land the shots on a wildly dodging target. However, once those shots connected, they _hurt_.

The Sidewinder did not happen to be juking madly, and so the shot was laughably easy to make. The ball of destruction impacted the small craft dead center, quickly enveloping it. The Sidewinder exploded as its shields fell and exposed the hull to the firestorm of plasma, and the remaining ships quickly began maneuvering to avoid any more shots that might be headed their way.

It didn’t work as well as they hoped. Jasmine was able to pick off two more before any sort of return fire answered her, and a third before she was forced to start moving as the shots were beginning to hit her shields a little too hard.

Once again she whirled into the deadly dance she knew so well, darting between ships with her weapons blazing. She entered a focused trance, blocking out everything but the swirling ships and flashing lasers. This time, however, she had Alenka, who was an expert at balancing the ship’s power draw in the most efficient way possible. She was a master at reading’s Jasmine’s actions and predicting where energy pips were going to be needed next. This allowed Jasmine to focus solely on flying, and ships were dispatched in a brutally efficient manner. Sometime after she had destroyed her fifth ship the rest of the pickets joined the fray. Clearly, the pirates had realized that she wasn’t just some poor exploratory ship that they could destroy and loot, and would need to throw everything they had at her if they wanted to take her down.

It still didn’t help. Even with the extra support, the pirates crumbled before her like sand before a wave. The Python was the last to go; whoever was piloting it wasn’t a complete incompetent like the rest of them had been. In addition, even when battered and beaten, the Python remained an exemplary ship. Even so, it fell like all the others, leaving Jasmine as the last ship left amongst a field of debris for the second time that day.

With the guard dogs dealt with, she turned her attention to the base. She rarely went up against fixed emplacements, as more often than not they mounted extremely powerful weapons that would shred even her highly advanced ship in seconds. However, those were generally government-commissioned stations, built with certain standards in place. This, on the other hand, was clearly a slapdash job, built with whatever materials the pirates had been able to get ahold of at the time.

Now that she was closer to the base she could see what a mess it was. Atmosphere constantly vented out of cracks in the rock, and rust covered the structures stretching out from the depths of the asteroid. Even worse, a highly suspect mailslot was sporting containment fields that were flickering, threatening to fail and vent the entirety of the air within the hollow asteroid in very short order.

With a predator’s intensity, Jasmine fixed her attention on the flickering fields. The mailslot was the rectangular space in all modern spaceports that held several magnetic fields that retained air while allowing ships to pass through. It those fields failed there would be a massive decompression as the air rushed out into space, leaving the interior in a hard vacuum. It wouldn’t knock out the entire base, granted, as there would still be airtight pockets left throughout the base. She imagined these would be areas such as the outfitting bays and command center, reinforced in order to guard against such decompression, but it would certainly be a start. Any holes she opened in those safe areas would immediately vent into the newly created void in the main staging area of the asteroid. She could also send a few incendiary missiles into those areas if she so desired, given that fires required oxygen to burn. However, also given the fact that they wanted to take over the base once they were done forcefully evicting the pirates, the less damage they dealt to the base the better.

She thought for a moment, recalling what little information she had on base assault. Bases generally didn’t have shields, they were simply too large for any shield cast over it to provide any real protection. The power draw was too much in most cases. However, they were generally heavily armored, and armor was a lot easier for pirates to obtain and maintain than any sort of high-class shield generators. This base was no exception, with huge metal plates welded into place, scattered across the surface of the asteroid. Glancing at a thermal view of the base, Jasmine saw large heat signatures pulsing behind those plates. If she was simply attempting to destroy the base she would hit those plates with armor-piercing rounds from her gatling cannons, then put a few missiles into the gap. If she tried hitting the armor plate with missiles before punching a hole, the explosive force would just roll off the armor and little damage would be dealt. However, once a gap had been created, the majority of the explosion’s energy would be contained behind the armor. Depending on how much force was applied, it could potentially punch straight through the rock wall into whatever vulnerable machinery was behind it.

But once again, she wasn’t trying to destroy the base. She shook her head, reminding herself of that fact. She quickly reconfigured her hardpoints, opting for two huge cannons and a large gatling gun, all gimballed. Finally, she replaced all the remaining spots with missile launchers. Two were pack hound racks, while the other two were standard missile racks, one filled with the aforementioned incendiary missiles and one carrying a large variety of rockets: A few armor-piercing shaped charges, shrapnel launchers, carpet munitions, and finally the cold-fusion warhead that Alenka had fabricated.

With her weapons locked and loaded, she glanced at the base readouts again, noting the blind spots in the turret’s firing arcs, then banking towards them. Once in range, she began to take shots with the enormous howitzers behind the cockpit. The cannons belched fire as they put their great shells into whatever emplacements Jasmine could see, opening even larger blind spots in the base’s defenses. All Jasmine had to do was clear a swath to the mailslot, then put a few rounds into the field generation units there. Alenka expedited this process by micromanaging the targeting along with the subsystems, pinpointing the next turret in line whenever Jasmine destroyed one. She did this for each of the guns separately, allowing each cannon to fire independently of the other. As Jasmine flew closer still, the rotary cannon began opening up in small bursts, riddling whatever it was pointed at with holes.

The final turret in her way detonated in a gout of fire, and Jasmine swung around the edge of the base, turning to face her target. Cannons zeroed in on the field generators, and Jasmine’s finger tightened on the trigger, ready to send a hail of shells screaming in once the reticles stopped jittering.

Then everything went wrong.

Jasmine’s console shrieked as the base was suddenly shrouded in a shield that shouldn’t have been possible. Multiple heat signatures lit up the asteroids surrounding them, previously masked by something. Then the targeting locks started to appear. First one, then two, then three, then too many to count. Jasmine shared a wide-eyed, panicked look with Alenka, then turned her attention back to the scanner just as Alenka triggered another pulse. Time to see just how much trouble they were in.

A lot, as it turned out. Scores of asteroids around the base had opened up previously hidden doors, and out of them sprouted a horrifying assortment of emplaced weaponry. These were a far cry from the ragtag bunch of turrets on the base itself. Each was surrounded by a glimmering shield, and that wasn’t even touching upon the turrets themselves. There were plasma accelerators larger than any she had seen before, lasers with power cells glowing ominously, cannons with barrels longer than her ship, huge banks of gatling guns, and missile racks sporting dozens of tubes brimming with large rockets. They were all clearly well maintained, gleaming with a dangerous luster as their servos kept them pointed directly at their target.

Which just so happened to be their ship.

Jasmine felt the blood draining from her face. She’d been duped, pure and simple. The heat signatures from any one of those gargantuan emplacements should have been detected by their initial scans, even if they had been attempting to mask their signals. Something that large put out a lot of heat and some of it should have bled through even the thickest of rock. Not that it mattered now; she’d been caught, and now all she could hope for was a miracle.

Or an ego, as it turned out. Her inbox pinged with an incoming video communications request, and Jasmine glanced at Alenka again, her brow furrowed in confusion. Alenka shrugged, her fingers flying over the console in front of her, trying to find some way out of the mess they had gotten into. She was busy, and that meant it was Jasmine’s job to talk to whatever scum was running the operation.

Jasmine grimaced. She wasn’t _good_ at talking to people; that was Alenka’s forte, she was the diplomatic one. Jasmine _was_ good at making threats and carrying them out, but the subtleties of polite conversation had always eluded her. Probably not the best attitude to have when whether they lived or died rested on how much of a suck-up she could be.

She grimaced again. She hated it when she had to suck up to people, and that probably contributed to why she was so bad at it. Couldn’t ever be too late to learn, could it? No time like the present, especially when their lives could depend on it.

With that cheerful thought in her head, she plastered what she hoped was a friendly expression on her face and opened the communications channel. As the static in the video feed cleared up, she had to fight to keep her laughter down and her friendly façade in place.

This was gonna be a lot harder than she originally thought.

The face that had resolved into focus on the screen was that of a balding, middle-aged man who was even shorter than Jasmine. He was immensely fat, and it looked like he was stuck in the ridiculous throne-like chair that he had seated himself in. The only thing on him that looked well-maintained was the truly impressive moustache that stretched over his face like some freakish caterpillar. His clothes were rumpled and stained with patches of questionable origin, but what color did show underneath was loud and clashed in creative but horrifying ways.

In other words, the very epitome of a miscreant pirate lord.

“Well well well, look what the cat dragged in,” he spoke in a nasally, breathy voice that made Jasmine cringe and her smile waver, “If it isn’t the esteemed Jasmine Rose paying our humble abode a visit.”

“I must admit, I didn’t see this coming at all, well done,” Jasmine replied. Flatter him, keep him talking, hope he doesn’t have any smarter crewmen to redirect him and keep him on track. That was how you did it, right? Hopefully it would Alenka enough time to find a way to escape. “I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure of your acquaintance. May I perhaps know the name of the mastermind behind this ingenious trap?”

The words hurt coming out.

Clearly pleased, the corpulent man smiled broadly, revealing teeth as yellowed and stained as the clothes he wore. “I am the venerable Lord Alfredo Fettucc, pirate king of these systems.” He paused, clearly waiting for a reaction of awe or fear. Jasmine instead had to choke down her laughter once again at the ridiculous name and titles, and behind her, she heard a strangled sound come from Alenka’s chair. At least now her smile was more genuine.

“Oh my goodness, not the Pirate King Fettucc,” Jasmine exclaimed in what she hoped was an awed and fearful voice. “I’ve heard of your exploits. The stuff of legend back in… uh… my home system,” she finished lamely. Lying had never been one of her strong suits.

The self-appointed pirate king’s expression soured. “I should sure hope not. I take great measures to ensure that secrecy is maintained. Very _thorough_ measures.”

Crap.

Jasmine backpedaled furiously. “Oh no my lord, I simply meant-”

“I wouldn’t suggest lying to me again, Rose,” he interrupted, “I’m not a forgiving man, and should I grow tired of your presence my finger might just slip,”—he rested a pudgy finger on a large red button—“and rid myself of it.”

Jasmine paled even further and she found herself re-evaluating the man in front of her. He may be a disgusting egotistical slob, but he wasn’t stupid—for the most part—and more worrisome, he was ruthless.

Never a good combination.

“My apologies,” Jasmine sought to keep the fear and anger out of her voice, “I assume you wished to discuss something given the fact that we’re even still talking. Unless you just popped in to gloat?” She let a bit of venom seep into her words with that last part, and Alenka made a small angry sound. Jasmine could feel her accusing stare burning into the back of her skull. Right, don’t antagonize the person with the death button.

Fettucc, surprisingly, seemed delighted by her insolence. His smile returned and he clapped cheerily, chortling. “They told me you were a spunky one, and it seems that they weren’t wrong. Now now my dear, of course I called you to gloat. I’ve just caught _Jasmine Rose_ , no small achievement. However, I also happen to have a proposition that I believe you’ll find much more preferable to death.”

Jasmine raised an eyebrow skeptically but kept her tone as polite as she could manage, which turned out to be somewhere between sarcastically saccharine and completely caustic. “Well, it doesn’t look like we have much of a choice. Let’s hear your offer.”

Her mind was racing. She hadn’t realized she had made such a name for herself. On the contrary, she had done her best to keep her exploits on the down-low. A well-known name tended to attract far more trouble than it was worth. Even so, her name clearly carried weight, or at least it did around here. She wanted to know why, and was still trying to figure out how to prod the man in the right direction when he started speaking again, her ears protesting at the awful sound.

She had forgotten she was speaking to an egotist, as it turned out he didn’t need any prodding whatsoever.

“I must say, you’ve been a thorn in our side for some time now, Rose,” Fettucc said in a musing tone, considering one of the enormous, gaudy rings he wore in what Jasmine was sure he thought was a mighty, powerful pose. If the man had been physically capable of turning his torso in his chair, it might have been. “I believe we first ran into you when we were attempting to, ah, _relieve_ a convoy of a certain torpedo. Needless to say, our efforts were summarily halted by a certain Federal Corvette. Now, I’m a man of business, and sometimes things don’t go your way, so I was ready to pass that opportunity up with no ill-will. However, whenever we received a tipoff that a juicy bit of tech was getting shipped, that same Corvette was there to ensure that our endeavors remained fruitless.”

Fettucc’s eyes narrowed dangerously. “Now, as I said, I’m a man of business, and again, I can accept losses every now and again. However, the regularity with which you thwarted us was becoming an issue, and so I arranged for you to make your way here. A few supply convoys hit, a bounty issued for the interloper’s removal, and next thing you know, the fly waltzes into the web, lured by the honey of profit. It was really quite simple.”

Fettucc smiled grotesquely, clearly pleased with himself, and while Jasmine kept her face neutral, but she was carefully analyzing what the obese man was saying. There was obviously an information leak somewhere in the lab, and judging from how he described drawing her in, she was willing to bet she knew who it was. It also explained the frequency that Jasmine had needed to chase would-be marauders off while escorting the freighters.

“Very impressive, though that doesn’t explain how you managed to hide your turret’s heat signatures from our scans,” Jasmine hedged, “I’m very interested in that, I’m sure you understand.”

Fettucc’s smile broadened even further, and Jasmine wished that it really hadn’t. His teeth were just that revolting. However, it did confirm what she had suspected from the beginning: the man’s ego was out of control. If given the chance to brag he would take it, and Jasmine planned to use it to squeeze as much information out of him as possible, simultaneously giving Alenka as much time as she could.

“Just because you stopped most of our expeditions doesn’t mean that the lab’s products are completely out of our reach. Our benefactor provided us with a certain type of plating that is all but impervious to scans, though this has been its first field test. Given the end results, I’d say it served its purpose magnificently.”

Jasmine scoffed. “Those rats, they’ve been holding out on us. We haven’t gotten anything like that.”

“Indeed,” Fettucc’s eyes glittered with maniacal glee, “But from what we hear, you did get the blueprints to that torpedo from our first meeting. Our sympathizer overheard one of his colleges complaining about the fuss you made over it.”

“I make sure that I’m properly compensated for my work, Fettucc,” Jasmine retorted snarkily. He had only mentioned the blueprints. Could it be that he didn’t know that she was in possession of one of the finished torpedoes? That might work in their favor, but unlike Fettucc, she didn’t intend to reveal her whole hand quite yet. She ensured that her hand was out of his field of view, then motioned for Alenka to prep the missile racks and arm the warheads. She also signaled to warm up another one of the lab’s toys. She used a code the two of them had worked out ages ago, and when Alenka coughed, Jasmine knew she had seen.

Jasmine had a pretty good idea of what Fettucc wanted, but she wasn’t planning on working for the slimy pirate lord in this lifetime, that was for sure. She worked for whom she chose based on how much they paid her and how happy they kept her, not because they had any sort of leverage on her. Those that tried it more often than not ended up dead. At that point it was a matter of pride.

“So I’ve heard,” Fettucc continued, eyes still glinting madly, “It’s partially because of that insurance of fair compensation that you’re still alive. You see, I’m at the end of my rope. I’ve tried letting the lost merchandise go, I really have. But when you’re constantly in the way, something has to be done about it.” He let the thinly veiled threat hang in the air for a moment, then resumed his spiel. “However, whatever is done doesn’t necessarily have to result in unpleasantness. Quite on the contrary, it could be the start of a wonderful working relationship.”

There it was, the proposal he had mentioned. A business proposal, no less; Jasmine had been right on the money. She feigned interest, hoping to keep him talking.

“Oh really? What do you have in mind?”

Fettucc clapped again, pleased. “I’m so glad you said that. Spunky but smart, I must say; I like you. Well, I was thinking something along the lines of this: In exchange for your life, no small amount of credits, and any of the tech we’ve been able to get our hands on that you haven’t, you’d be taken up in our payroll. You’d continue working for the lab, but any blueprints you’ve acquired would be shared with us, and occasionally your instruments would malfunction at a decisively inconvenient time, allowing us enough time to secure the goods we set out to acquire. It wouldn’t require much from you, just some information from time to time, the aforementioned lapses in protection, and occasionally a mission or two for us. This way you can even keep your lab commission. Just think, you’ll have double the income for no more work!”

His glowing expression then hardened. “Of course, the alternative is death. You’ve stood in our way, and if you won’t work for us then there is no reason to keep you around. I have no interest in haggling, so you can either take it or leave it. It shouldn’t be much of a choice, I would think.”

Jasmine smiled sweetly at the repulsive pirate, her first real smile to the man, though this one had a predatory edge to it. “I’m inclined to agree, my dear Fettucc. Given the situation, I can really only say one thing.” She gripped her controls tightly and steeled herself.

He smiled, clearly expecting a different answer than the one she was about to give. “Excellent, now, if you wouldn’t mind powering dow-”

“Go to hell.”

With that, she slammed the throttle forward and shot straight towards the base.

Fettucc sighed. “I was hoping you wouldn’t do something foolish like that. Oh well, I suppose with you out of the way the lab’s deliveries will be defenseless for a while, so it’s not a complete loss. Still, it’s sad seeing such potential wasted. Prepare to fire.”

Jasmine ignored him, though she kept the channel open. She wanted to hear his smug, self-assuredness fade as she taught him that no one _ever_ threatened Jasmine Rose and got away with it.

She triggered a few of the missiles and watched intently as they streaked towards the base. She didn’t expect them to actually do any damage, but the information it would give her on how the base was defended would be invaluable. Knowing was half the battle.

Of course, the other half was gratuitous violence, but that somewhat cheapened the saying.

As she had expected, the missiles never actually hit the base itself. Most of them were shot down by point-defense turrets that had appeared out of recesses in the rock, though a few got through and were stopped by the shield.

That shield would be her biggest obstacle. Jasmine doubted Fettucc was stupid enough to waste valuable resources on weak shielding, and since bases could support much larger generators, they were bound to be strong. She also suspected that some of the lab tech had found its way into the shield generators, boosting them to levels previously unheard of.

Luckily, she had a plan to get around them.

Fettucc laughed wheezily. “Oh my dear, you didn’t really expect to do anything with that? I’ll be honest, I was expecting a bit more from you. I suppose it’s just as well I didn’t hire you, I would have been disappointed.”

Jasmine ignored him again, then muted him entirely when she heard Alenka speak for the first time since they had gotten into this mess. “I do hope you have a plan.”

Jasmine laughed dryly. “No, I just pissed off the man with the giant death button cause I was feeling cheeky. Of course I’ve got a plan.” She hesitated, the added, “Most of one, anyway.”

Now it was Alenka’s turn to laugh. “How did I see that coming? Oh well, you’ve gotten us out of some pretty bad situations before, I’ll trust that you can get us out of this one. Because if you don’t, I’m totally haunting you.”

“Yeah, great stuff. Now, can I get that escape vector data I assume you were working on earlier?”

“Oh sorry, I was watching porn instead,” Alenka cracked, but a moment later Jasmine’s console pinged and a dotted line appeared on her HUD, weaving its way through the asteroid field. Their ticket out. But first, Jasmine had some thrashing to do.

She unmuted Fettucc just in time to catch the tail end of his order. “-ire when ready.”

Jasmine took a deep breath, waited for an agonizing moment, then another, then wrenched her stick to the side while simultaneously punching a button, praying that the drive would work.

With a jarring _vvv-zwip_ the entire ship teleported several hundred meters to the right, and Jasmine looked over just in time to see a terrifying fusillade of munitions slam into the base’s shields.

“Looks like the blink module works just as well as your scan-shields do, wouldn’t you say, Fettucc?” Jasmine asked, in the same sugary-sweet tone.

Fettucc had to scrape his jaw off the floor, but when he had gotten over his initial shock, his face reddened at an alarming rate. “Rose, by god, I’m going to take great pleasure in ridding the galaxy of you.”

“Good luck with that!” Jasmine replied happily, immensely amused at the shades of maroon and purple Fettucc’s face was taking on.

“Fire again! Fire everything! Blow that smart-talking bitch out of my sky!” Fettucc shrilled, and Jasmine winced at the high-pitched scream.

She didn’t bother taunting him further, as all her attention was currently focused on keeping her ship intact. Cannonfire was easy enough to dodge, along with dumbfire missiles and the plasma accelerator shots, but the lasers and guided missiles were posing a problem. As she streaked over the surface of the base, she kept an eye on her readout, blinking when she could to keep the brunt of the incoming firepower off her shields. Even so, the lasers were chewing through them at an alarming rate, and she quickly deployed shield boosters to bolster them for as long as she could. She only needed to keep this up until enough friendly fire had dropped the base’s shield, and then she could come in for the coup-de-grâce.

With a sickening lurch, the ship was hit with a particularly powerful laser blast, and the shields dropped with a shrieking buzz. Jasmine swore colorfully and Fettucc laughed nastily.

“Having issues? Maybe you should have thought of that bef-” With a snarl, she muted him again; no sense in keeping him around until she was ready to hear the little piggy squeal.

She could hear beams and the occasional bullet impacting the top of her ship, and she slowly rolled as she dodged, trying to spread the damage out evenly across the surface of her ship. So long as they didn’t hit anything vital, they should be fine.

A particularly large plasma accelerator blast impacted the base shields a moment after she had blinked out of the way, and with a flash, they were gone. Misfired munitions started to chew into the rock itself, and Jasmine noticed a marked decrease in the amount of laserfire coming from the surrounding turrets. The missiles and shells still fell around her like rain, but the point-defense grid on the base was active at full-force now. They filled the space around her with dazzling flashes of light as the small turrets did their best to minimize the damage done to the base.

“I really hope those turret’s targeting systems are slaved to the command center,” Jasmine muttered to herself, “Hey Alenka, could you highlight a few point defense turrets for the cannons? Tight cone, I want as clear a path as possible for the missiles.”

“Sure thing.”

Now that the hardest part of her job was done, she prepared to loop out and make a final run on the base. She also unmuted the communications stream, only to hear Fettucc swearing colorfully and screaming.

“-ing useless, all of you! It’s one single ship! They’re not the ones who killed the shields, you morons did that! How hard could it be to put one round through their canopy or into their engines? Better yet, hit that blasted blink drive! Hit anything, just _shoot them down!_ ”

Jasmine couldn’t help but poke fun. “Having issues, o mighty lord of the pasta?”

“Rose I swear, part of me is tempted to just cripple your ship so I can torture you myself.” A vein had started to pulse dangerously in his forehead.

“You get any madder and your face looks like it’ll explode,” Jasmine said, weaving around a large missile that vaporized a moment later in a blast of light, “And while I’d love it if you did our job for us, I’d rather do the honors myself, if you don’t mind.”

Fettucc sneered. “As if you have enough firepower to hurt us. It would take you hours to break through the walls of this base, and you don’t have hours. You can’t dodge forever.”

“Well, I do happen to have an antimatter torpedo that’ll detonate the second the containment fields fail,” Jasmine answered in a thoughtful tone. “I’m not sure of the exact yield of the thing, but I daresay it’s more than enough to erase your fat ass from this reality. What do you think, Lord Grease Spot? Wanna take that chance?”

The rate at which the color in his face shifted from oversaturated to pasty was impressive. “You’re bluffing. You’d get caught in the blast wave too.”

Of course she would, but he didn’t need to know that.

“I don’t know, but I’m not the one stuck in an immobile base. That’s a gamble I’m much more willing to take. Again, is that a chance _you_ want to take?”

Her fingers tightened on the trigger. Reticules danced across her HUD, settling on the turrets Alenka had selected.

“FINE! Cease fire, cease fire. What do you want, Rose?”

Jasmine smiled, a cold, ruthless smile that held none of the false charm she had plastered on previously.

“That’s quite simple, really. I want your head. Oh, but I do want you to brush your teeth beforehand. I do believe our business to be concluded, Alfredo Fettucc. Good day.”

She squeezed the trigger. First came the reports of the cannons as they hurled slugs at the point defenses, opening a hole in the screen. Then came the sheets of fire as she launched every single missile she had loaded straight at the mailslot.

Fettucc was mostly right. The majority of her ship’s ordinance couldn’t really do much to his base without the large timeframe required to deploy it properly.

She did carry two weapons that could completely obliterate the base, however.

The first was the antimatter torpedo, which Fettucc was also correct in assuming was a suicide move to use. There was no way she could escape the blast before it overtook and destroyed her, and since she was planning on living to fight another day, that ruled out that option.

That left the cold-fusion missile. It might have been a bit overkill, but at least with that one, there was only a chance of self-destruction, not a guarantee. And quite frankly, she didn’t have any better options.

The rest of the missiles were there as a shield for the real deal, designed to distract what remained of the defense grid. They might shoot a few missiles down, but in the end, it really wouldn’t matter.

Fettucc raised an eyebrow, clearly unimpressed. “And here I thought you weren’t actually bluffing. Well, I must commend you, it’s not often I get played like that.” He turned to someone off-screen. “You may resume firing.”

Jasmine was already on her way out, following the line Alenka had plotted. “Oh, I wasn’t bluffing, Fettucc. I just don’t need to waste such a valuable piece of tech on the likes of you.”

“Is that so? How do you mean?”

“Let me give you a hint. Revenge is a dish best served cold, yes? The same could be said for atomic fusion.”

His eyes widened in realization, just as the slew of missiles soared through the mailslot. “Focus fire on the center of that form-”

His feed dissolved into static as the base erupted into a wave of rock and twisted metal. Jasmine bit her lip as she continued to follow the escape route plotted for her. Luckily, her gamble had paid off, and the turrets had been slaved to the base, so she didn’t have to worry about dodging gunfire. Unluckily, now she had much bigger things to dodge now, namely large chucks of the destroyed base. She ducked and wove amongst them, even blinking a few times, shooting for the edge of the asteroid field. Once she was far enough away she could jump out, and that would be that.

“See? I told you I’d get us out of this,” she said as they zipped through the shrapnel. “I haven’t been wrong yet.”

“I’ll reserve judgement for when we’re repaired, refueled, and rearmed while docked at the lab,” Alenka replied, “Better hope you didn’t jinx us.”

Jasmine laughed, letting the tension flow out of her in a rush. “Yeah, here’s hoping.” She sobered somewhat. “Pity we couldn’t appropriate the base for our own uses, though, that would have been a nice bonus.”

“Yeah, it would have. But you know what?” Alenka said, “I’m willing to bet that the lab will be more than willing to send a decent reward our way once we unmask the turncoat there. Speaking of, I’ve got a few ideas of who it might be. You?”

“Yeah, I do. Something tells me that the fact that we got this bounty from someone different this time isn’t a coincidence. How much you wanna bet that supply officer we spoke to has been feeding info to the pirates this entire time? What was his name? Hanson? Hudson?”

“Yeah, Hudson,” Alenka answered, having already called up the details of their assignment, complete with the date it was issued, and who did the issuing. “What an amateur, didn’t bother masking his identity at all. Then again, I’m sure he expected that if we came back we would be on his side, and if we weren’t, we wouldn’t come back at all.”

Jasmine laughed again as they cruised out of the asteroids, the shields coming back online with a hum. She aligned the ship with a distant star, the first step in their journey back to the lab.

“I’m sure it’ll come as quite a shock to the poor fool, but hey, he picked his side. Just so happened to be the losing side. Send a message to the lab, let them know what happened and our suspicions. I don’t want to give him the chance to set up any sort of nasty surprise for us if he catches wind of our work here.”

As Alenka tapped out a message, Jasmine charged the frame shift drive, feeling the tightness across her shoulders ease. Almost home.

Naturally, she had relaxed too soon.

As the ship leaped forward, the proximity alarm shrilled, and the entire ship shook violently as they were rocked by an explosion.

Jasmine found herself fighting with an unresponsive helm as they hurtled uncontrollably through hyperspace. Behind her she heard Alenka cursing, and damn, the girl knew some creative swears.

“Alenka! See if you can hit the emergency override! Not sure what else’ll pull us out of this!”

“Of course you ask that of me when the inertia dampeners are offline! Why couldn’t you have asked me when everything was smooth sailing?!”

“Well I’m sooooorry I didn’t know that we’d be knocked off course by something! From now on you can stand next to the thing whenever we jump out of a system!”

Jasmine heard a groan, then scraping as Alenka dragged herself towards the back of the bridge where the override lever lay. A few agonizing seconds went by, in which Jasmine continued trying to beat some sense into the controls—to no avail—and then everything went dark.

They dropped out of hyperspace with a thunderous _bang_ , though they continued spinning wildly. The starscape flew by at a sickening speed, and Jasmine fought down her bile.

“Great, you’re halfway there! Now if you wouldn’t mind, finishing the other half would be real great!”

“What, do you think I’m snoozing back here? I’m trying, give me a minute! Never understood why they made these things so damn sticky…”

With a dull _chunk_ , the lever was forced back into its place, and the ship’s systems came back online with a cheery purr. Jasmine wrestled with the controls for a moment before finally forcing the whirling ship to a standstill. Once they weren’t spinning wildly anymore, she sagged back in her seat. Behind her, a _whuff_ of exhaled breath indicated that Alenka had collapsed against the bulkhead, clearly as winded as she was.

“Well, that was quite a trip,” Jasmine said after a moment, sighing as she peeled herself out of her seat, glancing over her readout of the ship’s systems. Nothing good.

Alenka groaned as she hauled herself off the floor, cracking her neck. “No kidding. Told you that you shouldn’t have said anything, you jinxed us.”

“I’m sorry there’s no wood to knock on in here, I’ll make sure to have a block of it installed expressly for that purpose.” Jasmine retorted, “Could you run an initial scan for me? Find out where we are, if there’s anything that the general report didn’t detect that’s gonna require fixing, that kind of thing. I’m gonna work on fixing what I know is busted.”

“No problem,” Alenka said as she flopped back down in her chair, swiping through the various start-up menus.

Jasmine moved to the middle of the cockpit near the entrance, before reaching up to pull a panel down from the ceiling. She couldn’t reach it. She tried to ignore the stifled laughter behind her as she did her best to stalk haughtily over to the small ladder mag-locked against the wall with what dignity she had left. Alenka had gotten it for her, partially to tease her, but partially so that she could actually reach the ceiling maintenance hatches. However, it was a matter of pride that she always attempted to reach the panels without the help of the ladder.

It had eluded her thus far. Maybe one day.

As she popped open the panel, a cloud of smoke billowed out to greet her, leaving her coughing violently as the ship’s ventilation systems kicked in and the smoke cleared.

“Opening a hatch to smoke is never good,” Jasmine complained, as she shined a light into the recesses of the maintenance bay, “And what I’m seeing is even worse.”

“You think we’re in a bad spot now?” Alenka asked, her eyes glued to her screen, “It’s about to get worse. Guess where we are.”

“Up Satan’s butt, I don’t know,” Jasmine snipped.

“Close,” Alenka replied, swiveling her readout so that Jasmine could see, “We landed in Thargoid space.”

“As if this day couldn’t get any worse,” Jasmine mumbled as she turned back to the corroded mess that was once a thrumming network of wires and cables. “At least the odds of them actually finding us are basically nonexistent, especially powered down like we are. That does mean that we’re on our own though, not many people are dumb enough to head out here with a rescue op in mind.” She frowned, turning back to face Alenka. “What do you figure knocked us out here? Some sort of hyperspace mine or something like that would be my guess.”

“Yeah, I’m willing to bet that there were one or two safe routes out of the system, and anyone trying to jump out to any other point would get hit and knocked out of hyperspace. Sort of a ‘dead men tell no tales’ kind of plan, I’d wager. They wouldn’t want anyone spoiling their little operation there.”

“Too bad we already rained on Lord Stinkpot’s parade. I daresay we did a fair bit more than spoil their fun.” Jasmine poked at a few of the wires and grimaced when they sparked feebly. Never good. “Just as well, as I think we’re gonna be here for a while.”

Alenka swiped through a few screens, humming thoughtfully. “I can’t see anything that really needs attention that hasn’t come up on initial diagnostics.”

“Good,” said Jasmine, sliding down the ladder, “I’m gonna focus on getting the engines, shields, and FSD back online, anything else can wait until we get back to port. The main reactor is gonna need some attention; we’ll need to take that offline so it can cool. Life support is wired to a different subsystem than engines and shields, so it looked fine, but could you double-check that, please? Really don’t want that failing while we don’t have any mobility.”

“Already did, and as long as it’s got power, we’ll have air.”

“Well, thank goodness for small victories, I guess.” Jasmine headed for the hatchway, “C’mon, this ship isn’t gonna fix itself.”

They spent the next several hours crawling through cramped ductwork, bypassing corroded connections and jury-rigging replacements for power cells, fuses, and capacitors. Soon the hallways were littered with cables snaking from one hatchway to another, and both Jasmine and Alenka were covered in grease.

“Well, looks like we’re done with the easy bit, now comes the fun part. You want to walk or get the reactor?”

Alenka wrinkled her nose. “I always whack my head when I try to work on the reactor; it’s too cramped in there. I’ll walk.”

“Walking always makes me sick, so just as well,” Jasmine said as they walked towards the rear of the ship, where the airlocks and bulkheads lay. They stripped off their outer clothes, dropping them in the sanitizer as they passed, leaving them in their skintight Remlock hazard suits. Alenka thumbed a button on her suit, and a helmet sprang up from behind her head to enclose her head. She grabbed a magnetized toolbox, then stepped into the airlock. She flashed a thumbs up and smiled before her helmet tinted and she turned to face the outer door as the airlock cycled. Small jets flared to life on her suit, and she drifted slowly out of the airlock. Jasmine waited until she was out of sight, then keyed her comms as she turned away from the door and headed towards the bowels of the ship.

“How’re we looking out there?” she asked as she stopped before another airlock, this one with an imposing, vault-like hatch as the second door. She too triggered her helmet, feeling the cool material spiral up out of her collar and around her head.

“I definitely think it was a mine, there’s a pretty clear blast pattern out here. The engines themselves don’t look that bad, but the connections look about as fried as all the others.”

Jasmine gasped in mock-horror. “They scratched my paint, the bastards!”

Alenka snorted in amusement. “Yeah well, you already killed them, so you can’t really exact your vengeance on them again.”

They laughed, and with that Jasmine turned her attention back to the large door in front of her. It groaned open, the great hinges protesting against the weight.

Beyond lay the reactor, the heart of the ship. There were a few smaller generators scattered throughout the ship, powering smaller systems like life support and other environmental controls that benefitted from a dedicated power source. However, the behemoth that lay before her accounted for the vast majority of the power that ran through the ship. It ran on nuclear fusion; hydrogen atoms colliding within it, fusing into helium and releasing a huge amount of energy in the process. It was that energy that powered the ship systems, and the helium plasma that the reactor output was channeled to the engines and used to create thrust at sublight speeds.

It was a magnificent piece of technology, and Jasmine had successfully broken it. Again. Ironically, for one who spent so much time in and around bleeding-edge tech, she was _excellent_ at breaking pretty much anything that came her way. Luckily, it usually only applied to smaller electronics—data-pads, PDAs and their ilk—but occasionally she really screwed up something in one of her ships. As a result, she had become a very capable field engineer, capable of recognizing and fixing pretty much anything. She knew her ships inside and out better than anyone, and it certainly paid off in situations like these. She was very proud and calling in a rescue team when she didn’t need one was more than her ego could bear.

She had worked on the reactor several times before, so she knew what to expect and what to look for. She suspected she already knew what was wrong, a rough exit from hyperspace like that would play havoc with the finely tuned regulators, causing an imbalance in the fusion chambers. Unlike a fission reactor, fusion reactors weren’t at risk of a catastrophic meltdown if a chamber ruptured. If a breach occurred, the plasma in the chambers would simply cool and revert to a gas. The reactions would stop, and repair crews could access the reactor after it had cooled to workable levels. There were safeguards against any sort of catastrophic failure, and given they had worked this long, Jasmine didn’t expect them to have failed.

However, there were still a million and one small things that could and did go wrong with it, seemingly at every opportunity. Such was the nature of the beast, not that Jasmine had to like it. However, she was hoping that the current issues would be easy fixes, assuming her assumptions about what was amiss were correct.

Jasmine approached the inert reactor and whacked the side of one of the fusion chambers, a side popping open to display the regulator. One of the most important pieces on the reactor, it was one of the safeguards protecting against meltdown, acting much like a fuse would in an electrical system. As the name suggested, it ensured that there wasn’t ever too much fuel flowing into the reactor, kicking off if safe levels were exceeded. However, because they were such delicate pieces of tech, they were easily knocked out of alignment or otherwise interfered with. They were insulated from knocks like those received during most combat maneuvers, but they had quickly learned that they were not Jasmine-proof. Given the frequency with which she had to reset them, Jasmine had gotten rather good at it, as was usually able to blaze through her routine in about fifteen minutes.

Just as she had suspected, a flashing red light drew her attention to the actuator housing. The cylindrical mechanism had been knocked completely out of its housing and now laid on the floor of the box, something that Jasmine had never managed before.

As she was fitting it back into place, her comm buzzed in her ear and she heard Alenka’s voice, albeit muffled and distorted due to the radiation shielding surrounding the reactor compartment. “Hey boss? I’ve got something here, not entirely sure what it is. Probably trouble.”

She sounded apprehensive, never a good sign.

“What’s up?” Jasmine answered as she shut the compartment, moving to the next one. When she opened this one, the actuator actually fell out of the regulator, clattering to the floor. She swore and reached for it, and so was only half listening to what Alenka said as she scrabbled after the stray instrument.

“Something attached to the hull, it’s got some sort of gripping claws keeping it there, so definitely foreign. The holes the claws opened are really fresh, so this hasn’t been here long.” She paused, clearly expecting some sort of response.

“Mhm…” Jasmine mumbled noncommittally, her fingers just brushing the tip of the actuator.

“It looks like it came from the mine, there’re scratches leading from the holes to the center of the blast mark.”

“That’s nice…” She managed to catch the tip of the cylinder with her fingertips and drew herself back, triumphant.

Alenka clearly realized she was getting ignored, so her next words carried a bit more of an edge to them, “It looks like a tracking device.”

That got Jasmine’s attention. Tracking devices were really bad news; when someone wanted to find you, it was generally out of malicious intent.

“How can you tell?” she asked, slotting the actuator back in its place.

“I’ve got a general knowledge of what trackers look like, we’ve used them ourselves, remember?”

“Yeah, that job in Vega.”

“Yep. This doesn’t look quite like any tracker I’ve ever seen before.” Alenka confirmed. “Also, it’s pulsing a radio wave out every ten seconds or so, my comms are picking it up. Just seems like gibberish to me, though.”

“Can you get it off the hull?” Jasmine asked, moving to the next chamber with a bit more urgency. If there was a transmitter, there was almost always a receiver. Jasmine didn’t really want to stick around and find out who had that receiver.

“Yeah, I think so. It’s stuck on there pretty good, but I think I can fit a pry bar under it.”

Alenka went quiet and Jasmine continued with her task, working with a brisk efficiency now. She had completed three more and was working on the final chamber on the side when she heard Alenka swear loudly.

“Is everything alright out there?” Jasmine asked, pausing.

“That damn thing is a drone!” Alenka spat, “When I got it off the hull it came at me! I’d be toast now if its drives had been calibrated a little better!”

“You going to be alright?” Jasmine asked in alarm. If the drone had claws that could puncture military-grade plating, she didn’t want to think what it would do to the Remlock suit, or even worse, the flesh underneath.

Alenka didn’t respond for a moment, and Jasmine’s heart skipped a beat. It resumed its normal function, albeit at a higher pace, once she heard a triumphant exclamation in her ear, along with a dull _clang_.

“Got it!”

“What did you do?” Alenka was obviously alright, but Jasmine didn’t know what ‘got it’ meant in this context, and so wasn’t sure if her friend might still be in danger.

“Give me just a second…” Alenka responded, and Jasmine waited with bated breath until the muffled bark of Alenka’s sidearm sounded through the comm. Normally she wouldn’t have been able to hear the sound in a vacuum, but the vibration had traveled up the sleeve of Alenka’s suit, where it had been registered by her mic.

“Ok, we’re good now, the drone’s been forcefully disassembled,” Alenka said, her voice an octave higher than it normally was. She had obviously been rattled by the encounter. “When it came at me again I gave it a good whack with the pry bar, and that gave me enough time to get to my gun.”

Jasmine laughed. “You played baseball with a drone to give you enough time to shoot it? Dang, Alenka, I always knew you were creative, but I never took you for the sporty type.”

Alenka sniffed, replying in a haughtily wounded tone, “The ends justified the means. Let’s just hope that whoever it was sending a message to never got it.”

Jasmine sobered quickly. “Yeah, how much did you get done before you found that thing?”

“Not much, still got to check on and connect another one of the main engines, and then I need to get to the maneuvering thrusters.”

“Damn. Alright, get to it.” Jasmine said, thinking quickly. “I was thinking about asking you to work on a few of the hardpoints, get them working, but I don’t think we have time. Just get those engines back online and get back in here.”

“Sounds good. With all that’s happened, I just want to get home and take a break.”

“That sounds really nice right about now,” Jasmine responded, moving to the other side of the reactor. Halfway done now. “Lemme know whenever you get done with the thrusters.”

“Will do.”

Silence fell, and Jasmine focused back on the reactor, determined to finish repairing it before anything else interrupted her. As she progressed, she realized that she had upset almost every single actuator in the reactor, something she had never managed before. Maybe it was high time to ask the lab for a better reactor…

She closed the last regulator and moved to the diagnostic panel on the wall nearby. Holding her breath, she ran a scan, releasing it in a relieved huff as the panel lit up green. She looked over the report, ensuring she hadn’t missed anything, before heading back towards the airlock.

The great vault door had just shut behind her and the scrubbers had started cycling when Alenka called in again, her voice strained in panic.

“Hey Jas? If you’re not done yet, I’d suggest you finish up. Like, right now.”

“I’m in the airlock, cycle should be done in a minute or two. Why?”

“I think I figured out what was receiving the pings from the transmitter. Somebody picked up the phone.”

“What? Who?” Jasmine asked, thoroughly confused.

“Not who, Jas. What. The Thargoids are here.”

Jasmine felt cold fear clawing its way up her throat, a sensation that she didn’t feel very often, and one she hated with a burning passion. If a human had found them, it could have been different. Jasmine could bribe humans. Hell, if it meant she got to live, she’d even sell out the lab. Of course, once she was back in fighting shape, she’d hunt them down and kill them, but that was beside the point.

Thargoids were a completely different beast. No one had ever been able to communicate with one, and any sort of negotiations that might once have been held were overshadowed by the wanton slaughter on both sides. If a Thargoid showed up and you weren’t prepared for it, there was very little likelihood that you would make it out of there alive.

Jasmine had destroyed her fair share of Thargoid ships, but that was almost always in her Krait, a much nimbler ship than her Corvette, with hardpoints more suited to the weaponry Jasmine employed to kill the organic ships. She had tangled with a few of the smaller scout ships in her Corvette, but that had been under ideal circumstances.

The circumstances now were about as far from ideal as one could get. Alenka was still outside, Jasmine was stuck in the airlock, the majority of the ship’s systems were jury-rigged, and Jasmine wasn’t sure if Alenka had had enough time to finish checking the maneuvering thrusters. The engines likely wouldn’t function at full capacity, and Jasmine doubted the shields would hold up long, assuming she could even power them on before the Thargoids attacked.

“How many are there, and what classes are we looking at?” Jasmine stared at the countdown timer above the outer airlock door. A minute and seventeen seconds. An eternity.

Alenka swallowed audibly. “There’re six of them here.” Jasmine felt a chill run down her spine. That many appearing was nigh-on unheard of, unless they were attacking a station. Alenka’s next words made any thoughts of possible escape flee from her mind, replaced by one emotion.

Fear.

“Jas, there’s a Hydra here.”

A Hydra. The newest and most advanced Thargoid ship anyone had ever seen. A purpose-built combat craft, or as near as they could tell. No one had managed to kill one yet, though many had died trying. The rest of the Thargoids didn’t matter anymore. That Hydra could easily destroy her Corvette on its own, even if she had been running fresh from a station.

She had no idea how she was going to get out of this one. Clearly running away was her only option, but she didn’t know how she was going to do even that now.

Then her mind alighted on the antimatter torpedo. As far as distractions went, there weren’t many better, and certainly none that Jasmine had access to. It was self-powered, so all she needed to do to deploy it was open the fighter launch bay, which had been modified to serve as a suitable launch platform. It had been a simple modification, as the bay already acted as an oversized railgun for the shipboard fighters. All that had needed to be done was add variable-width servos to the rails, allowing them to pinch closer together to handle the torpedo.

Hell, it probably wouldn’t work, but it was worth a shot. All she had to do was get out of this airlock and to the cockpit. She eyed the clock. Forty-five seconds to go. She keyed her comms, speaking quickly.

“Alenka, I’ve got an idea. It’s dumb, but it’s better than nothing. Don’t worry about it, just focus on getting yourself back into that airlock.”

“Why do I get the feeling I’m not going to like the way this is going to go,” Alenka grumbled, but Jasmine soon heard hurried footsteps echoing across the outer hull. She could forgive Alenka for scratching her paint this one time, she supposed.

The timer was at eighteen seconds when she heard the ship’s proximity alert go off.

“Incoming corrosive missile!” Alenka cried, and the footsteps paused.

“No! What are you doing? Get to cover, that missile will eat right through your suit!” Jasmine shouted. Twelve seconds.

“You’re not the only one who can come up with dumb ideas, boss,” Alenka said, and Jasmine pounded a fist against the airlock door. Open, damnit! She wasn’t sure what Alenka had in mind, but she was sure that she wouldn’t like it.

She heard Alenka take a deep breath, heard the proximity blips speed up, then heard Alenka’s gun fire, three quick shots.

Much like Jasmine’s own sidearm, Alenka’s pistol was a custom piece, fitted to her hand and built to her specifications. However, whereas Jasmine carried a powerful hand-cannon, capable of putting a disturbingly large slug into whatever she pointed it at, Alenka favored a compact shotgun. It was a remarkably forthright weapon for someone who generally preferred subtlety and subterfuge to accomplish her goals, but Jasmine wasn’t about to argue its effectiveness, especially when in Alenka’s skilled hands. It was a brutish, snarling weapon, whose only purpose was to put as much metal into the target as possible.

It was this saving grace that protected Alenka, allowing her to destroy the missile mid-flight.

“I think we’re good for now,” Alenka panted, before Jasmine heard her footsteps across the hull again.

As if it had been waiting for that moment, the airlock door whooshed open, and Jasmine flew out the door, heading for the cockpit. It was by some divine intervention that she didn’t trip over the many cables in her way.

She skidded into the cockpit and threw herself into the captain’s chair, her fingers flying as she initiated startup. She held her breath as she waited to see if their repairs were sufficient to bring the ship back to life.

With a vibrating thrum that was felt throughout the ship, the reactor roared to life and energy coursed through the ship once again. When Jasmine didn’t immediately hear the hissing and popping of failing connections, she breathed a small sigh of relief. One hurdle down.

“You inside yet?” She asked, working through startup procedures at a breakneck pace.

She didn’t immediately get an answer, and she paused, concerned. “You still with me there?”

“Yeah,” Alenka responded shakily. “So you know how they’ll sometimes scan the ships they come across?”

“Yeah? Why?”

“I think this Hydra just scanned _me_.”

Jasmine cursed and redoubled her efforts to get them moving. Alenka could be in danger. She looked over her radar, not liking what she saw. Like Alenka had reported, 6 Thargoid ships surrounded her, and the closest one, the Hydra, was within spitting distance. Two Medusas flanked the Hydra a fair distance away, and three Basilisks circled the entire scene like foreboding sentinels. Any one of them could have easily destroyed them in their current state, but Alenka had somehow piqued their interest and stalled their attack for the moment.

Jasmine looked up out of the viewport and saw Alenka standing above one of the medium hardpoints in the middle of the ship. She had been heading towards the amidships airlock—had been almost there, too—but had been interrupted. She was wreathed in an ethereal yellow light and seemed to be in some sort of trance, just standing there and staring…

…At the Hydra hovering close overhead, casting her in shadow, like some malevolent herald of doom. Damn, the thing _was_ scanning her.

“Get to that airlock, that’s an order!” Jasmine barked, saw Alenka jerk as if she had been slapped, then shake her head. She glanced at the cockpit, flashed Jasmine another thumbs-up, then disappeared around the edge of the ship. The Hydra pulsed red, clearly angry that the object of its fascination had escaped, and a few moments later, the airlock indicator flashed as it was closed.

“I’m in.” Alenka gasped, and Jasmine threw caution to the wind as she flung her throttle forward. She glanced over her readout and decided that if she was gonna piss them off, it might as well do it right. She shot away from the Thargoids, and once she was several kilometers out, she swung about, lowering her launch bay. She put her crosshairs squarely over the huge Hydra, which hadn’t moved, but was still pulsing angrily.

“Alright, you good-for-nothing bug, here comes the flyswatter…”

With a howl of discharged electricity, the rails of the launch ramp sent the large torpedo flying away from the ship, and it quickly emerged from beneath the nose of the craft. It seemed to hang there for a moment, outlined by the Thargoid behind it, then its engines flared to life and it streaked away, dead set on the center of the Hydra.

Jasmine held her breath, watching intently as the torpedo, seemingly so large next to her ship, faded to a pinprick in front of the Hydra. Nothing happened for a moment, and Jasmine was ready to give in to despair when a flash appeared in the center of the Thargoid ship.

A second, brighter flash followed the first, and then an expanding sphere of blue energy erupted from the impact point. It quickly eclipsed the Hydra, and Jasmine had to shake herself out of her reverie.

“What did you just do!” came a loud cry in her ear. Clearly Alenka had seen the flash.

“I uh, might have shot the antimatter torpedo at them?” Jasmine responded, a little sheepishly.

“Yeah, great, and why are we still sitting here as that shockwave is coming at us?!”

“I was working on it! Just wanted to see the show, y’know?” Jasmine retorted as she turned the ship about. “Let’s hope that sowed enough chaos for us to get away…”

The flashes of Thargoid lasers zipping past answered her question. Clearly not. Jasmine cursed under her breath, an unflattering remark about the Thargoid’s lineage, and blanked sharply, trying to find an opening as she began to charge her frame shift drive. The bulkhead behind her opened, and Alenka entered, moving quickly to her seat and strapping in.

“I really hope this venture ends the way you hope it does,” Alenka grumbled.

“Yeah, you and me both,” Jasmine replied, twirling around a few more shots, grimacing when she heard cables jerking around behind her. Right, couldn’t pull the same tricks she normally did; she’d have to come up with something new.

Great. Forced to come up with a new way of flying with a faulty ship and angry Thargoids after her. No better time, really.

The frame shift drive was only half charged, and no matter how well she dodged, some shots still found their mark. Her shields were taking a pounding, and she wasn’t sure how long they were going to hold out. Probably not long enough for them to get away, at any rate. She needed something, anything, to divert the Thargoid’s attention for just long enough to allow her to jump out.

Apparently, the universe was listening, and it answered her plea. An alarm shrilled, and Jasmine looked at her console in alarm. It was the proximity alert again, but it was picking up something new.

Something big.

Whatever it was, it had grabbed the attention of the Thargoids, as lasers no longer whizzed past her viewport. Of course, she could have taken her chance there and left, but with the threat of imminent death no longer hanging quite so low over her head, her curiosity rose up. She wanted to see whatever it was, and where it had come from. She pivoted the ship back the way they had come, towards where the Hydra had been enveloped by the bubble of matter meeting antimatter.

Alenka started to protest, but fell silent as the scene of the destruction they had wrought came into view. The Hydra was gone, but the bubble remained, pulsing with an eerie blue glow. It looked like the gravitational lensing of a black hole, only rimmed with electric blue arc of electricity. Instead of a black center, it had one of the deepest navy, roiling with what looked like a violent energy storm.

It was a breathtaking sight on its own, but what really drew the eye was what was emerging from the strange lens.

What appeared to be the tail end of a massive ship was slowly sliding out of what was clearly some sort of portal. How a simple matter-antimatter detonation had created such a thing she had no idea, but she suspected it might have had something to do with the Thargoid she had hit with the missile. Who knew what strange compounds were present in their ships; there was quite possibly some exotic materials or alloys in them that could have meddled with the reaction and produced the strange portal.

The end of the strange craft just kept coming, and Jasmine felt her eyes widen as she began to appreciate just how big the structure really was. Vaguely cone-shaped, it obviously wasn’t Thargoid, that much she was certain of. However, there was a certain similarity between the craft. Flowing lines, non-metallic shades, and chitinous hull plates all pointed to one thing. Whatever was coming out of the portal was also organic technology.

Jasmine began to wonder if the ship would ever stop. It was already bigger than many megaships and smaller outposts, and yet showed no sign of a front emerging from the hole. However, it abruptly came to an end, seemingly before an appropriate end had reached. As the craft lazily rolled away from the portal, Jasmine saw why.

It had been cut in half. The front section of what had once been a truly gargantuan ship had been cleanly sheared away. Fires raged in several exposed corridors, while others remained eerily empty. The Thargoid ships, now in view, were circling around it, their ghostly scanners playing over the destroyed behemoth. Their petals flashed as the ships communicated, and then one of the Basilisks turned away. A swirling wormhole, the Thargoid’s preferred method of travel, appeared in front of it. It launched itself forward and into the rift, disappearing as the wormhole closed behind it. The rest of the ships finished their circuits of the derelict, which had drifted a fair way from the portal, then turned back towards Jasmine.

“Umm, not to interrupt, but they seem to have remembered us,” Alenka pointed out, “Can we please leave now?”

Jasmine didn’t answer. She was staring at the portal the severed ship had come from, a portal which was now shrinking, slowly disappearing into nothingness. If something could come out of it, what was to say that something couldn’t enter it? Her mind was racing. This might be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Who knew next time when a Thargoid would be polite enough to sit still and eat a highly volatile explosive? Not only that, but even the Thargoids didn’t seem to know what the strange ship was. It was likely that it was an entirely new race, one that neither the Thargoids nor the humans had ever encountered before. They were clearly advanced—the ship’s size and design attested to that—but there seemed to be an even bigger fish out there, something that could literally tear this new ship apart. If they could find and befriend either one of these mystery races, it might be enough to tip the scales in humanity’s struggle against the Thargoids. Jasmine could be a famously self-interested person at times, but even she didn’t want to see humanity wiped out. Where would the fun in that be?

Alenka read her face, then followed her gaze. Her eyes widened as she realized what was going through Jasmine’s head, and she spluttered, “No! No way in hell, Jas! You’re not thinking about going through that, are you?”

“Weeeeeeelllll…” Jasmine drawled, twisting to look Alenka in the eye, “That thing came out, so why can’t we go through the other way?”

Alenka opened her mouth, probably to question Jasmine’s sanity, but Jasmine interrupted her, speaking quickly.

“Just think, Alenka. There’s a completely new highly-advanced spacefaring civilization, something no one’s seen before, possibly even two of them. I mean, _something_ absolutely wrecked that ship. What if we were able to level that kind of power against a Thargoid? The war would be over in weeks. We’d be heroes, known across the stars as the ones who saved humanity from the Thargoid threat. Who knows when an opportunity like this will land in our laps again? We may never have a chance like this again, do you really want to pass this up and go our whole lives wondering what we missed?”

Alenka glared daggers at her, then sighed. “Damnit, I hate when you do that. Fine, but if we end up trapped in some sort of in-between, I reserve the right to say ‘I told you so’.”

Jasmine grinned with childlike glee and turned back to the viewport. “Agreed. Strap in, it’s about to get bumpy.”

She reached for the throttle, her fingers tingling as she wrapped them around the worn surface of the thrust lever. She took a breath, then quickly pushed it forward. As the ship accelerated, the still-charged frame shift drive kicked in, and space blurred. They shot forward, into the portal, and into the unknown.

Jasmine caught a brief glimpse of clouds of dark blue flickering with lightning, much like a nebula, then a vortex of swirling energy appeared in front of her. It hung there for a moment, before seeming to stretch away, forming a tunnel through the great unknown expanse of clouds and lightning. They were sucked towards it, but just before they entered the vortex, Jasmine heard a _crack_ of discharging electricity, and then everything went black.

“—smine? C’mon, boss, up and at ‘em.” Jasmine came to with a gasp, bolting upright and smacking her forehead against Alenka’s, making her stagger back.

“I didn’t mean it literally! Damn, I always knew you were hardheaded, but you didn’t really need to give me a demonstration.” Alenka said, rubbing the rapidly reddening mark.

“Sorry about that,” Jasmine apologized, “But in my defense, you shouldn’t have been standing so close.”

“I’ll keep that in mind next time I have to wake you up, though next time probably won’t be under similar circumstances,” Alenka replied. “What do you remember?”

Jasmine shook her head to clear it, then thought for a moment. “Not much. We entered the portal, it was really trippy, some blue lightning and stuff, then nothing.” She rubbed her eyes. “Huh, and here I thought I was going to remember that for the rest of my days; ‘A momentous occasion that forever changed the course of my life’ and all that jazz.”

Alenka gave her an odd look, before standing up. Jasmine realized she was lying on the floor next to her chair, though she wasn’t too keen on moving. The floor was nice and cool…

“I can’t say I really blame you. That lightning you remember? Some of it looked like it hit the ship, then arced to you.”

“Huh,” Jasmine said, finally finding the motivation to peel herself up off the floor, “So you’re saying I got hit by lightning? That’ll certainly do it. Where are we, anywhere familiar?”

“No,” Alenka said, helping Jasmine back into her seat, despite her protests, “But we’re not in some endless void either, so I can’t say I told you so.”

“Ha, told _you_ ,” Jasmine crowed, looking past Alenka’s fretting form to behold a vast tract of stars.

And a bright pinprick of light that was very clearly _not_ a star.

“Hey Alenka?” Jasmine asked, pointing to the shimmering dot, “What’s that?”

Alenka turned. “You’re asking me? I haven’t been here any longer than you have, you know, and almost all of that time was spent trying to wake you up.”

As they watched, the speck continued to sparkle, then began to flash rapidly. After a few moments, it quickly expanded into a lens not unlike the one that Jasmine had so recently flown through. Nothing happened for a moment, and then an enormous space station came hurtling out of the void, maneuvering jets flaring wildly all across its surface as it struggled to regain control.

The base was a wreck. Fires burned across its pitted and scarred surface, and sparks showered from a large tower jutting up from the center with a large crack running through it. However, under all the damage, Jasmine saw a station designed to withstand the hardships of hostile space. Not a simple mining outpost, built to support asteroid prospectors, nor a grand Coriolis either, outfitted to support commanders and their ships. It was more modular in nature than any station she had ever seen, but at the same time, definitely bigger than any she had seen as well. Her eyes then fell upon the huge turrets scattered around the base and she felt her jaw drop. She had never seen a cannon that big. These absolutely dwarfed the turrets they had encountered at Fettucc’s asteroid base and were of a design Jasmine had never seen before. Most of them were in ruins, and she found herself wondering what might have armaments powerful enough to shred such formidable defenses.

That question answered itself as Jasmine looked back at the portal from which the base had sprung. Emerging from its depths was the front of a huge ship, and Jasmine realized with a jolt that it must be the front half of the ship that had saved their lives back with the Thargoids. Green lights began to glow in recesses along the bow, and Jasmine was willing to bet they were weapons of some sort. She glanced back at the weathered base. No way that poor thing stood a chance against the menace currently bearing down on it.

As it turned out, however, it did. As Jasmine watched, the portal collapsed on itself with the monster ship still within it, and it was this that cut the thing in half. With a small shock, Jasmine realized that she and Alenka had actually travelled back in time, unless those ships got cut in half on a regular basis. The base continued moving away from the portal, and Jasmine edged away herself, unsure what it was going to do next.

She was glad she did. As the small spot finally disappeared, a powerful lateral shockwave went out, cutting through the half of the large ship that remained. It also gave the base a close shave, as it carved the shattered remains of the tower clean off.

“Huh, well, that was… something,” Jasmine commented after a moment, not sure how else to sum up the day’s strange events.

“You said it,” Alenka responded, eying the base.

Before Jasmine could say anything else, an alert popped up, informing them that they were being scanned. A moment later, two large ships appeared from around the base, putting themselves on either side of what Jasmine assumed was the bridge. They were nowhere near the size of the shattered hulk now slowly drifting apart, but by no means small. They were about a third to half the length of one of the large Republic Farragut- or Imperial Majestic-class battle cruisers, capital ships of their respective faction. A moment later, a radio signal appeared, broadcast openly and without direction. They clearly weren’t worried about anyone overhearing, and given the circumstances, Jasmine doubted she would either.

“Looks like we’ve been noticed,” Jasmine said, “C’mon, let’s go meet the new neighbors, shall we?”

* * *

**Today's victim of universe-snatching in Elite Dangerous, an absolutely massive game that was just a _little_ too realistic for my taste. A bang-up space sim with an incredibly deep universe, but it took a little too long to progress for my taste. Something something me need more instant gratification or something. Cheers.**


End file.
